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 enormous if we lose this battle I am thomas goetz executive editor of wired magazine in wired we will look at the innovators and innovations that are changing our

world

in the next hour we will see three stories from acclaimed filmmakers about the

future

of energy explore cutting-edge innovations in how we drive, how we live and in our first story how we fuel our cars, these are all ideas that promise to shape the path to the

world

of

2050

.

Right now, the world has about a billion cars and we could double the number of cars on the planet by

2050

. So , if we double the number of vehicles, we actually increase the amount of fuel they consume and that will have a big footprint in terms of our demand for resources to move all those vehicles. We are extracting 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 it, we could have changes in the climate that we can never recover from. There are a number of forecasts. about what kind of transport economy we could move towards one vision is that we will use more and more liquid fuels, another the 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 its truly incomparable in terms of weight, how much energy is in a gallon of fuel and even if batteries are developed as some of their proponents hope they will be developed, we will not see batteries running in large trucks and we certainly will not see an electrified vehicle . airplane we are going to need transportation fuels that directly replace the petroleum-based fuels we use today, this has driven people to look for a wide range of other alternatives to the oil in their tank, the commercial production of ethanol as a fuel .

It started in Brazil in 1975. When we started the ethanol program, no one was talking about reducing emissions. This was not a problem at that time. First and foremost, we no longer had money to buy oil. After the first oil crisis, we were oil importers and today in 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 sugar cane. then you have a sugarcane plantation, you only have two things to produce sugar and ethanol.

My family has been in the sugar cane business since 1955 and about 30 years ago I thought there was an opportunity to produce more ethanol and now we are producing 120,000 cubic meters of ethanol. Brazil today has about 400 sugar flours, total sales are 30 billion dollars and this number is increasing if we look at how they produce ethanol and how efficient the process is. It's

real

ly a model for all of us, they grind the plant extract. the sugar from the cane the sugar goes to these large fermentation tanks that combine sugars with yeast that naturally produces ethanol they 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 brazil has arrived to a point where today they are using about 40 percent less oil than they would otherwise, but Brazil can't supply ethanol to everyone because it would have to cut back a lot on food consumption. production and in critical natural areas like the Amazon for that to happen and this

real

ly comes down to the fact that there is a limited amount of arable land and growing fuel for our gas tanks is yet another demand on that landscape that we cannot keep up with. thinking that I found a general solution for world problems I think that 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 in the meantime we have to do the best we can and the best in this moment is that we can convert sugar cane from biofuels to ethanol, it is an incredibly efficient process: you get about seven times the energy that goes into growing sugar cane in the US when we produce ethanol from corn for each unit of energy input.

We get about the same amount of energy, so we're not really gaining anything. We need a better process. We don't have to take what nature has given us. In fact, we can engineer plants and yeast to be more efficient and that is the basis for However, a lot of the work that we are doing now what we need to look at is which of the paths that come out of this are not only good financially but also good. good at sustainability and this equation is really open, right? Now we are in a race to develop fuels.

The race is not with other countries. The race is against time to satisfy the immediate and

future

demands that we made. The energy solution springs from the

earth

. Brazil is the most efficient ethanol-producing country in the world. Sugar Alcohol from Brazil can reduce the total carbon footprint by up to 70 percent compared to gasoline. The biggest challenge for fuel suppliers and automakers is to reduce CO2 emissions over 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 needed 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 had and find the process to convert it into ethanol and people call those first generation biofuels, we have a lot of laboratory work around the world that is looking at the second generation which generally converts cellulosic material from, for example, weeds into biofuels and States United is largely in the lead.

At the forefront of innovation, part of the equation for centuries, we have been using yeast to consume glucose and produce wine and beer. We're trying to do something very similar, only we're engineering the yeast to consume that glucose and turn it into a fuel or a drug or a chemical we call it synthetic biology and when I started in this area a lot of my colleagues were like, "Oh, haha, "This is great work, but where is the application? What are you going to do with these tools? Who cares? Malaria is a huge problem in anyone." Every year, around a million people die from this disease and most of them are children under the age of five, so we thought this was a great opportunity to engineer yeast to produce an anti-malarial drug called artemisinin.

This drug is derived from plants at the moment, but it is too expensive for people in the developing world, so my lab engineered yeast to produce small amounts of artemisinin. Now that the process is being scaled up and we will have this drug on the market shortly, but at a substantially reduced cost it turns out that the anti-malarial drug is a hydrocarbon and is very similar in many ways to diesel fuel. We thought, Oh my goodness, now we can focus our attention on fuels. We could make some changes to that microbe to turn it into a fuel-producing microbe if we imagine that glucose is.

For our new oil we need a source for that glucose, so the crops we are looking at are crops like switchgrass, this is a native grass that grows without much water and on marginal lands, but we could turn it into energy farms. The challenge, however, is that unlike sugarcane, it's very difficult to get the sugar from that biomass, so we use what we call a pretreatment process to extract the glucose from the plant and then we feed that glucose. to a yeast that we have designed to produce hydrocarbons and that yeast absorbs the sugar and changes its composition and gives us this high energy molecule, they float to the surface, 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 be applied by the end of the decade in terms of a sustainable equation for the planet: the role of biofuels It's 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 solving 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 is an even harder story than doing good science, imagine you could have a process that could take sunlight and carbon dioxide and convert them into fuel and imagine if that didn't involve growing anything at all. Synthetic biologists are trying to take plants and force them to do things they normally wouldn't do. On the other hand, material chemists like me want to do artificial photosynthesis to improve the process carried out by nature. In real photosynthesis, we should follow the model of plants. convert sunlight into fuel, but let's 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 is an example of a semiconductor that breaks the chemical bonds of water to produce hydrogen and oxygen, ultimately our parts will be contained in something that is easy to deploy, like bubble wrap, or Sunlight and water would enter, you would vent the oxygen into the air, but through the bottom. it would absorb its liquid or gaseous fuel which it could then collect and use for our cars, planes and storage.

Our goal is within two years to have the first artificial photosynthesis, a solar fuel generator that we can get our hands on and then get to scale. Beyond that time, we're certainly not good at predicting the future, but to me electric vehicles seem like a sustainable option. We have heard proposals for such crazy things as nuclear-powered airplanes and even some proposals for transporting cargo with vehicles that are lighter than aerial ones. So, if the future in 2050 includes a good amount of oil, what that would mean is that we haven't implemented as many of these clean technologies as we already know are possible when we think about how long it will take us to accumulate them. the oil industry we can't expect 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 compensate for that and that means basic research must be done now and by as many people as possible, we have a long way to go, but I am sure we will get there in the future. 3D maps will help people get places more efficiently, as we just saw in the race to produce cleaner products. energy advances meanwhile demand for cars continues to increase by 2050 it is predicted that there will be two billion cars on the planet and fuel consumption will have tripled to keep pace we will have to radically change the way we drive here is our next design-driven history the automobile emerged in many ways it was the future we thought of it as one of the most positive changes that had happened to society suddenly our ability to get a job changed we can live further away with larger plots of land with Better quality of life Everything seemed pretty good, but there are limitations to swearing by the car If it gets congested Your quality of life drops immediately Spending so much time in the car It's a very inefficient use of fuel consumption Things suddenly start to make sense it doesn't get you closer to where you want to go it actually sometimes takes you further the average american spends almost 300 hours a year in their car 38 of them stuck in traffic annually congestion consumes more than a billion in gasoline in the united states alone the The inefficiency caused by traffic, both financial and personal, is enormous.

The story of Dirk Sheen and Carmen White is not that unusual nowadays Dirk works an hour and a half away in Warrenville Illinois. I usually didn't get off work until 6 or 6 30 and I would say the usual time for him to get home is around 8. Usually when I wake up I'm the only one 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 when I wake up I check the traffic report to see ifthere is some delay. At worst, it takes me two hours to get to work.

We are already very limited in the amount of time we can spend with the children and our expenses are very high. Spending $400 a month on gas takes away from our food budget and we've never paid for gas like that 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 would totally agree with 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 more intelligently is a much more efficient approach to the inability to keep supply on par with traffic demand if a satellite photograph were taken.

From the road you can see that there is actually a lot of open space and if we had the technology for cars to drive closer but safer then utilization of the road network could be increased, what this means is that for be more efficient less fuel must be used 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 to places safer or more efficient today only helps you get from point a to point b, but what if I want to get somewhere and use the least amount of fuel possible or if I have a hybrid vehicle, I want to make sure I have enough charge not only to to get there but also to return home?

Therefore, the information that will help people achieve a more efficient or safer route is more detailed information about the road than many people believe is possible to collect. Today here in Chicago the Nokia Location and Commerce Unit is developing the next generation of lidar sonar mapping 360 degree video they are all components of what Nokia calls digital mapping we use 64 lasers that rotate and collect 3D data about the world, it creates what we call a point cloud of information that point cloud that allows us to measure distances and then between the points that we collect, that system combined with the cameras with higher precision location detection through inertial measurement units, that complete data system allows us to collect 1.3 million data points. per second, probably within two or three years 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 How traffic lights work, given the way traffic moves, all of those factors will be taken into account to ensure I have the best route, but better mapping that can integrate topographic infrastructure and density is only part of the answer.

The key to improving transportation efficiency is to build self-driving cars. Autonomous vehicle technology has tremendous potential to improve the efficiency of our road infrastructure by removing humans from the equation. We eliminate all the things we do wrong behind the wheel. Speed ​​up. Changing lanes too frequently. By combining autonomous vehicles with sophisticated 3D maps, we can make driving safer and more energy efficient. That next-generation vehicle is currently being built by Swedish transportation company Scania. The solution is to see that vehicles can use smart maps. Three-dimensional maps. With traffic information, vehicles will be intelligent and will communicate with each other, they will talk to each other, they will talk to the infrastructure and we will see

full

y autonomous driven vehicles.

The goal was to have multiple robots and see if they could travel 60 miles

full

y autonomously. my name is helen taylor my husband john and I are very passionate about fuel economy yes it's great to break world records but that's not the only goal now it's more important to educate people together we are showing drivers around the world world simple techniques to improve your fuel efficiency we run these educational programs we get people to ride with us and ultimately we modify their driving techniques things like simply checking your tire pressure before you even get into your car for every psi that your tires are underinflated you are wasting three percent of 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. to reduce CO2 emissions and here we have Shell sending us around the world to do that.

When you are on this planet, you always hope that you can make a real difference in people's lives when you get emails from people saying I have saved this amount. of money this year I can now put food on the table, then you will know that you are really making a difference by showing traffic density in urban infrastructure in a revolutionary way. 3D digital maps will help create a more fuel-efficient future, but these technologies are limited. Some drivers behind the wheel 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 by 2007. The US Department of Defense held a competition to see if a fully autonomous autonomous vehicle was possible. Darpa means the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has a competition to develop autonomous robots that could drive themselves in traffic. The goal was for Several robots will let them go on a course and seeing if they could travel 60 miles in six hours driving completely autonomously can be one of the most complex things we do every day. Drivers make dozens of decisions at any given time.

One study found that drivers were exposed to more than 1,300 pieces of information per At one time we made so many decisions when 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 feed a lot of data and generate a series of potential routes that the vehicle could follow. follow and although the robot does not have the ability to predict the future by using this rapid random route generation, the robot could anticipate a possible accident and choose a route to avoid it because it is always thinking about what things the car could do next .

One expects millions of cars to drive themselves in the short term, but there is one place where self-navigation technologies are being optimized to create the vehicle of the future beyond. Let's go to their test track on the outskirts of Stockholm, where it basically looks like a highway, but it's a separate test track where we carry out our own experiments Scania, the Swedish transport company, recently began testing its next generation of trucks. long distance using radar sonar and intelligent mapping. They have been able to drastically reduce fuel consumption. We have this example with platoons where they make use of the reduction in air resistance or air drag that 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, its speed, its actions in the vicinity. 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 terms, there is a wonderful body of research on people looking at schools of fish and trying to develop the capabilities of robots to work together.

Thus, they are wonderful examples from nature of how cooperation can lead to more efficient use of resources. You can see when people compete among tourists, they group themselves in platoons to reduce air resistance, they don't ride their bikes one behind the other so close, but because it's fun or because they are running it's because they are reducing the air resistance sitting behind Of the man driving a truck traveling at 55 miles per hour expends half of his energy just to move the air around him at 65 miles per hour that number jumps to almost two-thirds. Even if the platoon can reduce the energy used in a 10 percent, the savings would be substantial if a vehicle in front of another wants to brake, immediately sends the brake message to the other vehicles so that they actually brake at the same time as 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 on the system, the speed is automatically governed by obtaining information from the vehicle in front through its wireless system. , we want these vehicles to maintain a low speed. relative distance, so through this system we can reduce fuel consumption by reducing air resistance by 10 percent and 10 would mean that we can save approximately 8,000 euros per heavy vehicle per year; It may be some time before autonomous 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 you can pick up? The books are sometimes okay when we look to the future, the systems will definitely make it safer, more efficient and less expensive for you and will also make your life easier because you will spend less time on the roads. The city begins to speak, begins to tell him where. Is your congestion what is happening in different areas of the city? Suddenly, the car becomes part of a much larger ecosystem. We can watch how cars interact with other cars, how cars interact with infrastructure, and we drivers can start making smart decisions about how to get around.

Suddenly mobility becomes something completely different, no matter how much money we have, no matter how much money we have. No matter how much oil they have, everyone has to go in a different direction. We've seen that changing the way we drive can improve transportation efficiency, but what happens if we change? the way we build and live in our cities that is the theme of our next story looking for utopia we will travel to the united arab emirates and discover a city that rises from the desert let's take a look from the beginning we have dreamed of utopia a place where we could living in harmony with each other and in balance with nature many had imagined it they tried to design it but the dream always faded then I heard that they were building a new city called Mazdar near Abu Dhabi in the Arabian desert, it sounded like an unlikely place to me. utopia and I wanted to see it.

The last half century has been a pretty bad time for city creation. For the most part, the natural tendency has been to adapt to the automobile more than anything else. Try walking around Abu Dhabi. It is impossible. i have to take a car everywhere in dubai same thing 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 it doesn't seem too far from the highway, but they claim it will redefine the way cities are designed, built and powered.

Mazda City in Abu Dhabi will be the city of the future and the role model for the world once you see what they have imagined 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 slightly. Welcome to Monster City. We are driving into the bowels of Masdar City on an electric transportation system. It's disconcerting to see this for the first time and where are we going? The first big step Foster architects and their partners made was to place all transportation beneath the city, leaving Masdar's streets completely 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's about looking back at history to move forward. There are some very simple ideas that have a big impact. This is a pedestrian zone. There are no cars here. This has allowed us to push forward. our streets together to take advantage of the shade channel the refreshing breeze through the entire scale here it is based on the human being it is not based on the car as soon as you lift the pedestrian plane seven meters suddenly you have captured 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 theglass, heat is transferred to the building and we have to use more energy to cool it.

Can this really make a big difference? Yes, absolutely, for example, the center of Abu Dhabi, a 60 meter wide street, black asphalt with mirrors, reflective buildings, no relief from the sun during the holidays in September, the air temperature in both places was 39 degrees in abu dhabi the temperature measured on the asphalt was 57 degrees in masdar the temperature measured on the ground 33 degrees so we have lowered the air temperature and we are trying to do it as much as possible with as few of these simple movements as possible design reduced air conditioning needs by 60 percent, but this place is also technically very sophisticated, the roof panels not only provide shade but also generate electricity and the walls themselves are made of glass-reinforced concrete, literally sand Extracted from the desert, everything here is aimed at maximizing.

Nasdar energy efficiency 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 anything else, all the cities here in this part of the world have arisen from nothing, there was no nothing here not long ago except small settlements in the desert and then all this oil and all this money and suddenly you know, these cities started appearing, but they emerged in a false love for a Western model that was already obsolete the motto of the car-based energy hog city of the late 20th century for most of the world energy is very expensive but the United Arab Emirates occupies 10% of the world's oil and energy In Sochi it is cheap, you can ride a track ski in a shopping mall and build the world's tallest skyscraper, but even here cheap energy won't last forever and the people behind Masdar are determined to find alternatives, one of the most crucial aspects of our energy model and the quantification of the scenario is how much total energy the world will use in 2050.

The scenario team is made up of a group of people with a lot of imagination. I would say that we have political scientists, economists, experts in geopolitics. We really try to simplify the complexity around us. The scenarios team is currently paying a lot of attention to cities and urban development. Many megacities will be built in the coming decades. We are talking about the equivalent of a new city of one million inhabitants every week, which 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 demand and supply The decisions we make now will have a major impact for decades to come.

There is enough oil under these sands to last 150 years, but fundamental to Mazda's ideal is to obtain energy from renewable sources, geothermal and wind. And above all from a source that they have in abundance in the desert, the sun, this field of solar panels generates more than enough electricity to run the master and the excess. The energy is sent to the Abu Dhabi grid, but the panels Silicon are expensive and the price of solar energy must come down if it is to be competitive in Africa, Asia and Arizona in the future. Mazdar hopes to draw power from this prototype called the solar beam down.

Using highly reflective mirrors, the sun's rays can generate energy more economically and ecologically than silicon panels. The mirrors bounce the sun's rays towards the tower and then down to a point that reaches a temperature of 600 degrees. Steam can be generated to run turbines to produce electricity. There's just one problem: None of these solar technologies work at night, so Mazda needs to get power from the grid when the sun goes down, and that power comes from natural gas. The reality is that it is not yet possible to power mass stars completely without fossil fuels. The big challenge with Masdar will be how to make it a place that's 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 laboratory that develops things that can then be applied in existing cities around the world because that is where it will pay off there is no benefit if it is just about itself the benefit is how can everything matter What are you trying to do in the rest of the world right now there's only one store, two restaurants a day? bank and a few hundred students who live here it is too early to say whether Masdar will function as a city when it is finished, but a lot has been achieved, they are carbon neutral and largely run on renewable energy.

The solutions here won't work everywhere, although many cities are in cold climates and cooling is not their energy problem. They need to let the sunlight in, not keep it out. Cities like Los Angeles or Houston are built around cars. Can the lessons of Masdar be applied to them? Still, it's a step in the right direction and it's impressive that this step. It's being taken by a country that doesn't need to take it, I met a guy who said they actually do need to take it. He took me to the desert to explain to him that God says that God speaks about man's place in the universe that 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 everyone and everyone refused refused to accept this trust but the man being, you know, adventurer a little vain maybe too ambitious being banned he accepted it now accepting if there is a responsibility, taking responsibility is not always easy, utopia may be unattainable, but we must achieve it and Mazda gives us a clue of what cities will be like in the future, they may not look much like Mastar, but they will have shape. for the same concerns about energy, where it comes from and how it is used, the way we have been building cities lately is unsustainable, we cannot continue building them that way, but to say that we cannot build cities the way we have been doing.

Building them does not mean that we cannot 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 make them, but we have to make them in a different way than we make them. What we have seen is that the world of 2050 will not be drastically different from the world today, 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 chart our path towards the world of 2050. you