This around-the-world flight will have Piccard and fellow pilot André Borschberg flying for up to six days at a time in the single-seater before landing and switching off. “The plane can fly forever,” Piccard told us in an interview last year. “What cannot fly forever is the pilot. The pilot is the weak part of the chain.” Read more »

by Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Google

How will our minds be blown in the next 30 years? Well, that’s quite a long time, given the acceleration in history. Still, I’ll be brave and make six hypotheses.

1. Machine Intelligence

I think that just as the Internet has been such a great driver of change across so many spheres over the past 20 years, we will see machine intelligence in the same role over the coming decades.

Today, we are as an intelligent species essentially singular. There are of course some other brainy species, like chimpanzees, dolphins, crows and octopuses, but if anything they only emphasize our unique position on Earth — as animals richly gifted with self-awareness, language, abstract thought, art, mathematical capability, science, technology and so on. Many of us have staked our entire self-concept on the idea that to be human is to have a mind, and that minds are the unique province of humans. For those of us who are not religious, this could be interpreted as the last bastion of dualism. Our economic, legal and ethical systems are also implicitly built around this idea.

Now, we’re well along the road to really understanding the fundamental principles of how a mind can be built, and Moore’s Law will put brain-scale computing within reach this decade. (We need to put some asterisks next to Moore’s Law, since we are already running up against certain limits in computational scale using our present-day approaches, but I’ll stand behind the broader statement.) When we reach this point, we will find ourselves no longer alone. It’s difficult to overstate the importance that moment will have in our future history.

It may well result in further nonlinearity in the “rate” of history too, since minds and what we’ve dreamt up with them have been the engine behind history and its acceleration.

2. Gender Selection

For many thousands of years we’ve lived in a male-dominated society. I don’t think that we’re shifting toward “female dominance” so much as I think that the whole idea of dominance is a male paradigm, and that it is this paradigm that is being selected against — by increasing population density in the urban cores, increasing education, larger working groups, increasing collaboration, rising technological leverage, global trade and so on. It may be difficult to imagine this now, when the vast majority of the world’s capital is still in the hands of men and many of the STEM fields (which are also among the highest-paid) are still overwhelmingly male, but I think that men — and especially “manly men” exhibiting many of the classical correlates of high testosterone — will be at a distinct disadvantage in 30 years time. This represents a profound upset of the patriarchal system that has defined virtually all of recorded history, so … it’ll be a big deal.

3. Post-subsistence Economics

As machine intelligence, robotics, and technological leverage in general increasingly decouple productivity from labor, we will continue to see unemployment rise even in otherwise healthy economies. The end state is one in which most forms of human labor are simply not required. In 30 years, if not sooner, we will be facing this unprecedented situation — and whether it’s heaven or hell depends on whether we’re able to let go of capitalism, economic Darwinism and the Calvinist ethics that implicitly underlie these systems. Without a change, of course, we will see mass unemployment drive a radical acceleration of the already dramatic imbalance between the very wealthy few and everyone else, leading to ugly conditions in the cities and ultimately violent uprising.

On the other hand, if we are able to set aside our Calvinism, we will realize that given the technological efficiencies we have achieved, everyone can live well, with or without a job. Capitalism, entrepreneurship and other systems of differential wealth creation could still function on top of this horizontal base; but everyone must be fed and housed decently, have access to free health care and education, and be able to live a good life. I assume the nation-state will still be a relevant legal and economic construct in 30 years (though I’m not sure, as corporations or possibly other structures will complicate the picture); my guess is that we will see both paths taken in different parts of the world, leading to misery and war in some, where either the benefits of accelerating technology are slow to penetrate or Darwinian economics are left unchecked.

4. Self-modification

We’re rapidly figuring out not only how the brain is engineered, but also the body. Of course this implies greater mastery over mechanisms of disease, but more broadly, as biology becomes first understood and then engineered, Nature becomes open to profound and rapid modification. I don’t doubt that we will be able to alter aging mechanisms, “fix” various bugs in human “design”, make novel organisms and ultimately modify our own natures. As we reach the end of the 30 year period it’s hard for me to imagine that people won’t begin to explore these capabilities, which seems likely to lead to accelerated speciation. Machine intelligence and bioengineering will both demand that we rethink our legal and ethical foundations in a variety of ways.

5. Space

The world’s space programs have been essentially dormant for decades, as we’ve focused inward on developments like computers and the Internet, biology and neuroscience. But as our fundamental technical capabilities improve, barriers to space exploration do begin to come down; what was once a heroic effort requiring the full brunt of the resources of the richest countries on Earth will come within reach of companies and (initially, rich) individuals. We’ve seen only the first stirrings of this with undertakings like SpaceX and Moon Express.

At some point our grasp of materials science and nanofabrication will become sufficient to build a space elevator, at which point our world will expand a great deal as the energetic cost of escaping Earth’s gravity well goes to near zero, as many science fiction writers of the 20th century imagined. While I’m unsure of whether the space elevator will happen within the 30 year period, I’m confident we’ll see this within our lifetimes.

6. Sexual and lifestyle freedom

In 30 years, I think that not only will the more progressive places in the world have finished reconciling themselves to the wide spectrum of sexual orientation and expression, but also to a wide variety of life configurations beyond the nuclear family built around a single lifelong pair-bond. There are many forces contributing to this shift, and I suspect that an empirical case can be made for this in much the same way as for the gender ideas above. This is the least developed of my six ideas, but one that I think will have profound implications.

Bonus: Energy
One thing I’m leaving off the list above is the potential availability of very cheap, very abundant energy at some point in the future.  Many aspects of our outlook are conditioned on the premise that energy is limited and expensive. As a thought experiment, one can ask, “what if energy in virtually any amount were free?” This could imply an end to drought anywhere via desalination of seawater; it could allow us to enact climate controlling interventions on a massive scale, engineer materials that are currently cost-prohibitive, or let us get into space easily even if we continue to do it the hard way.

(Although freely available energy could let us save great ecosystems currently under dire threat, without great care it could also lead to disaster through chemical, thermal, biological and noise pollution on an unprecedented scale.)

We know that in principle vast amounts of energy are available to us through nuclear processes, so in principle an innovation could come along at any time that lets us tap safely into this energy. That would change everything. However, there is no trend or indication that suggests a timeline for such a development — it could happen next week, or still be a pipe dream a century from now.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas works on machine learning at Google. Previously a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, he has worked on augmented reality, mapping, wearable computing and natural user interfaces. He was also the co-creator of Photosynth, software that assembles photos into 3D environments.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas: How PhotoSynth can connect the world's images   Blaise Agüera y Arcas: Augmented-reality maps

When former accountant Sanga Moses ran into his sister on a far-from-home road carrying firewood on what was supposed to be a school day, his life changed. He knew that Uganda’s rapidly disappearing forests had big implications for the environment, but he hadn’t recognized the day-to-day effect it was having on the lives of his family and village. Now, with his company Eco-fuel Africa, Moses helps farmers transform agricultural waste into cooking fuel, and also sponsors tree-planting projects. Here, he tells the TED Blog about fast-changing ecological conditions in Uganda, and how he hopes to help restore the country’s forests as quickly as possible.

You started out as an accountant, and now you are an environmental entrepreneur. What was the moment that changed the course of your life?

I used to work for one of the biggest banks here in Uganda, and that meant that I was away from my home village. One day, I decided to go check on my mother and little sister. This was a Wednesday — and I ran into my sister on her way carrying wood. She saw me and started crying. She said, “I’m supposed to be in school today. But mother told me to go out and get the wood, and I do this at least twice a week.”

Seeing her didn’t surprise me at first, because I also carried wood as a kid. At first I didn’t get what was wrong. [When she started crying], I thought that maybe my mother was sick or something terribly wrong had happened at home. I helped her put the wood down, and we sat for a few minutes and I asked her, “What is the problem? Why are you crying?” She told me, “It’s about the wood. I’m supposed to be in school today. [But] my mom told me to skip school to go out and get the wood. ” I told her I would talk to our mother, and bring her back to a school in the city where I worked so she wouldn’t have to fetch wood.

But when I spoke to my mother, she said, “No, you can’t do that. She’s the only girl I have, I’m an old woman, I can’t survive without her. If you take her, I’ll be dead.” I went back to the city, but this conversation haunted me. I couldn’t really live my life anymore. I was constantly thinking about my sister, at the verge of losing the only opportunity she had to a better life — that is, education. And as a child who grew up in a rural area, my own life was transformed by education.

I wasn’t sure what to do. All I knew was how to be an accountant and work in a financial institution. But one night, I asked myself, “If I don’t don’t do something, who will? I am just complaining about what I can’t do, and my sister can’t go to school because she has to fetch wood.”

A young girl in Uganda carries wood. It’s a sight that changed Sanga Moses’ life. Photo: Eco-fuel Africa

But wait, why had this become a problem when you’d fetched wood as a child yourself?

When I was growing up, we had a forest close by. It no longer exists now. I used to graze cows as a kid and we would graze in forests — have a lot of fun, play hide and seek. But kids these days don’t have that luxury. It’s all empty land — you can see virtually 50 kilometers away because it’s all empty.

The problem is that once people deplete the few forests remaining, they must venture further to find wood. At first, I thought I was just blowing my sister’s dilemma out of proportion, but it became clear that she is not alone. There are so many people — so many kids like her who can’t go to school because there are no trees left in the villages. At my office, where I had access to the internet, I did some research. I found that Uganda has already lost 70% of its forests. According to UN statistics, Uganda will have no forests left by the year 2052 if nothing is done to curb the current rate of deforestation. In a few years’ time, Uganda will have to import wood. But we’re talking about people who live on less than two dollars a day. If we imported wood, would they be able to afford it? And if they can’t afford cooking fuel, how will they survive?

So what you noticed was a connection between changes in the environment and a threat to your community’s way of life.

Yes. It’s actually about the entire ecosystem. When I was younger and we had forest, we were semi-nomads — a cattle-keeping community that traveled with cows. It was easy to take care of them, because seasons were stable, rains were predictable, we had water. In the last ten years, things have changed for the worse. Now droughts are becoming persistent. Actually, as I speak to you now, my family is relocating our cows to a distant area because there’s no water left in the village — also a problem of deforestation. Even in national parks, animals are dying, and the population of buffalo is getting lower, and people encroach looking for water. People are competing for the little that is remaining. And in mountainous areas where all the trees have been cut down, the hills are so dry they develop cracks. When it rains, landslides cover people’s houses and it floods — people are dying because of this. It’s not the world that I grew up in.

So it became clear that this was an opportunity to save the remaining forests, and also to build a sustainable business. I decided to quit my job.

What was your plan?

The first idea I had was to sell solar cookers. I thought maybe if everyone in the village had a solar cooker, kids wouldn’t have to miss school to get wood. So I bought a few, with the thought that I’d give one to my mother and sell others to the neighbors. But my mother called me up after two weeks. She said, “You come and pick your thing. I can’t use it at night, sometimes dust blows into the food, and when it rains, we don’t eat, because it doesn’t work.”

It became clear that that wasn’t a comprehensive solution. I had to go back to the drawing board.

Sieving biochar. Photo: Eco-fuel Africa

How did you come up with the idea to convert farm waste into cooking fuel?

When I failed with my first idea, I went to Dr. Da Silva, a university professor, the head of the renewable energy department at Makerere, which I had attended. I said to him, “I am trying to find a solution to the problem of deforestation in this country, but I am just an accountant. I have no idea what I should do.” He gave me a lot of books, and I read about the possibility of combining farm waste and municipal waste into clean cooking fuel, while producing organic fertilizers. This made sense, because Uganda is predominantly agricultural. and no one uses agricultural waste: it’s usually burned and left to litter the villages. And drought has reduced crop yields and depleted soils.

So I saw a big solution to two problems: deforestation and food insecurity. That was very exciting.

I went back to him and said, I really like this idea, but I don’t know how to turn it into a solution that really works. He offered me his students, saying, “If my kids can work with you, we’ll help support you in any way.” He took me to his class, and said, “This young man is crazy enough to think that he can solve the energy crisis in this country. Who wants to help him?” Everyone’s hand went up.

With the help of the professor and his students, and using the university facilities, we made two pieces of technology. One is a portable kiln made of an old oil drum. It can be carried on a bicycle or two people can carry it. We give these to farmers, teach them how to carbonize and sieve agricultural waste, producing a powder called char. This is sold to us, and they keep the residues, the coarser portion of the char, as fertilizer. We also created simple machines — nothing sexy about them — to compress char into fuel that burns in the same stoves people already use. People don’t have to change the way they cook: it looks exactly the same as charcoal from wood, but burns slightly longer, and cleaner. It’s not as smoky. And we’ve developed a network of women who sell the fuel back to the communities.

The press machine forms briquettes of biochar fuel. Photo: Eco-fuel Africa

What kinds of crops produce the waste that you recycle?

Everything organic can be recycled — waste from maize, beans, rice, or whatever anyone grows. Anything normally left after harvesting.

What year did you start this business, and how far have you come?

We started in June 2010, but we first put our success from that on the market in November 2010. We’ve grown so much since then, it has like more than tripled. We have 25 full-time staff, and a network of 2,500 farmers who produce the char. These smallholder farmers don’t work for us directly; they are independent entrepreneurs, but we give them the technology and train them, and then they sell what they make to us. Each farmer earns an average of $30 a month in additional income. For many farmers, this is their only source of income. And we have 260 women retailers, franchisees. They sell from a kiosk, and and an average  retailer earns about $5 a day from selling our fuel. This almost makes them middle-income women in these communities.

So is this a for-profit operation, or are you turning all of the profit into planting trees?

Actually, it’s a hybrid. I call it a social enterprise. Part of the money is re-invested in expanding the network, creating more farmers, creating more retailers and paying salaries. But a portion of our profit is dedicated to planting trees. We work in partnership with communities, especially with schools. Schools are very excited because they want to inculcate the idea of sustainability in their kids. So we donate trees to schools, and we established a co-op called I Am For Trees — this is like Scouts or Girl Guides in the schools. The school club will have days when they say, “Oh, this Saturday we want to plant some trees. Can you give us some tree seedlings we can plant in our local park?” For example.

How many trees have you planted so far?

We’ve planted close to 150,000 trees, but we are not yet where we want to be. It’s what we can realistically do, given our size and our scale. I hope, as we expand, that we shall plant more trees. We are still a drop in the ocean, really, because the country has virtually lost all of its forests. It will take a lot of time, and a lot of resources, to restore these forests.

Prosy, an Eco-Fuel Africa micro-entrepreneur. Photo: Eco-Fuel Africa

What’s next?

Well, the plan is to continue expanding and train more farmers, reach more communities, enroll more schools in I Am For Trees, and stop depletion of the remaining forests. We still have about 30% of the forests standing. But they are under pressure, and we haven’t really covered even 10% of the country with our tree-planting program. We’re still in very few areas. The plan is to expand as quickly as we can, to ensure that all the trees that are left are not depleted for wood, and that we restore some of the forests that have been destroyed.

We do community outreach as we market our fuel, so we try to kill two birds with one stone. We demonstrate our fuel work, recruit more farmers, recruit more retailers, and recruit more schools. We show a video about the dangers of deforestation, sensitizing people about the importance of preserving forests and planting trees. And we invite local leaders to attend these meetings. But to be honest with you, I don’t think we can singlehandedly fix the problem. We are providing a solution, but there’s also a need to sensitize communities and the government to ensure that they understand they can’t just let independent citizens plant all the trees.

TED Fellow Jon Lowenstein visited Sanga Moses in Uganda in 2012 and produced a photo-essay called Sanga’s Dream. See the slideshow » 

Alex Laskey of Opower shows the amount of coal that should be able to power a lightbulb for a year. But because of massive energy waste, ten timess as much coal is needed. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

“For the past five years we’ve been running the largest behavioral science experiment in the world,” says Alex Laskey in today’s TED Talk, given at this year’s 2013 conference in Long Beach. “And, it’s working.”

Alex Laskey: How behavioral science can lower your energy bill Laskey’s company Opower partners with utility companies to deliver personalized home energy reports, all based off the insight that people are more inclined to take action on an issue when they think other people are doing better than they are. People’s energy consumption changes for the better after receiving these reports — either in the mail or through their app and website — and the effects appear to be long-lasting. This year, Laskey says, Opower expects to inspire 2 terawatt hours (TWh) in saved electricity. That’s enough to power a city of more than a quarter million people for a year.

This idea was sparked by a study run a decade ago by Arizona State University psychology professor, Robert Cialdini, who conducted an experiment to see what might make people turn off their air conditioner, and turn on their fan. Might money persuade them? Or an appeal to their better selves? Or the thought of saving the planet? Nope, nope and nope. Turns out, the one surefire way to get people to do something was to tell them their neighbors were already doing it. As Laskey comments in his talk, “Social pressure is powerful stuff.”

Sendhil Mullainathan: Solving social problems with a nudge That’s why Laskey and his team at Opower have partnered with behavioral scientists, including Cialdini, to experiment with different types of insights and, in doing so, try to make a dent in the giant energy problems facing the world. One of their unofficial advisers is Sendhil Mullainathan, professor of economics at Harvard and founder of Ideas42, a company “using behavioral economics to do good.” (Watch Mullainathan’s 2009 TED Talk from TED India, Solving social problems with a nudge »)

We got both Laskey and Mullainathan on the phone to talk about this fascinating field of the little things that make a person conserve energy. An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Alex, how did you come across behavioral economics, and why did you think it might provide a solid foundation for a company?

Alex Laskey: I came across it accidentally. Dan Yates and I had the notion that a utility bill is a wasted opportunity, and that if we had better information about energy consumption we could do something. We knew how energy efficient our cars are, for instance, and we thought it would be great to know how efficient our homes are. We were introduced to Bob Cialdini, one of the grandfathers of this field and one of the most cited behavioral economists. We didn’t know who Bob was, but we met with him in Phoenix and then he decided to take sabbatical and spent a year working with us to make sure we didn’t screw up. So that was my first introduction to behavioral science and economics. Since then, I feel very fortunate to have been introduced to this work and now embraced by this community of talented thinkers.

How did you two come across each other?

AL: Todd Rogers, who now teaches at the Kennedy School, introduced us because they are jointly involved in Ideas 42. Sendhil came to see us in DC a number of years ago, when we were about 35 people. My read was that he was excited about all the data we had and the opportunities we had to run experiments. For economists, it can be hard to get hands on a lot of data and find people willing to do innovative experiments.

Sendhil Mullainathan: To add to that, it’s also the case that in some sense the behavioral space has grown faster than reality. People will often take an interesting experimental study which has been done in the world, perhaps at small scale, and then it’s touted as some big solution. For me what’s amazing about Opower is precisely that it’s not a tiny study. This is a live operation using the principles at unimaginable scale. Opower is the best example of seeing how powerful behavioral economics can be and seeing this operate at scale.

So what has been the impact of this kind of thinking for Opower?

SM: The impacts are strikingly large. And it’s really interesting how persistent and stable they are years on out. It’s not a blip. Capital One does experiments to open credit card mailings, and they might work for one or two months, but after that, the novelty usually wears off. Here, the effects last for years, and they remain even when the intervention is removed. It’s stable behavioral change.

Why do you think that is?

SM: The problem with data is that it says a lot, but it also says nothing. “Big data” is terrific, but it’s usually thin. To understand why something is happening, we have to engage in both forensics and guess work. To guess, one possible candidate is that people aren’t changing behavior, they’re changing equipment. Better light bulbs lead to energy saving permanently.

AL: There’s a good chance that if we stopped sending, there’d be degradation. Our longest running programs are five years old, and it seems that savings persist as long as you communicate with customers. People do revert back to their old ways, and habits do need to be reinforced to sustain them longterm. But I’m optimistic. By and large people want to do the right thing. They want to save energy, they don’t want to waste it. They want to eat healthily, to exercise, give money to charity and so on. It’s hard to get people to do something they don’t want to do, and we’re nudging people to do something they do want to do. We’re bringing their attention in a new way that’s empowering and motivating. And I suspect energy is just one area where one could see these kinds of effects.

SM: That’s a really good point. More broadly, when people think of behavioral interventions, they think they are aimed at getting people to do things they don’t want to do and it’s some kind of mind control. But as Alex says, it’s very hard to get people to do what they want to do, let alone what don’t want to do! Most of these interventions are about translating intentions into behavior. They can appear to an outsider as if it’s about changing behavior, but it’s perhaps better thought of as realizing intentions.

What experiments are you looking to try next?

AL: We’re experimenting with different channels. Mail is expensive to send out, and we have nearly nine million households getting mail, so we’re trying to see what we can do digitally, with email, text or automated phone calls. We will run around 250 experiments this year. Some of them are quite modest, small experiments, but there are a lot of bigger experiments too. One I’m excited about is a big project this summer which is focused on very near-time actions. Historically we try to motivate people to save energy, period. But for the utilities market and grid, what’s more valuable is getting people to save energy at important times. So on a hot day, everyone turns on their AC and a utility has to fire up more expensive, often dirty power plants. So this summer in Baltimore we’re rolling out a program to 300,000 customers so they can earn a rebate on their utility bill if they save energy during key four-hour blocks, ten times through the summer.

How will that work?

The utility will notify you that the next day is a peak event via text message, email or phone, and remind you that you can earn up to $20 if you save energy between noon and 4. Then, at the end of that time, we’ll do the calculation and notify you of your savings by 6pm. So you saved $12, the average customer in the area saved $8, while the biggest saver earned $20. It’s a different problem to solve so I’m interested to see how that changes the experiment. What communication is needed to get people to do something urgently and quickly? We’ll have results in the fall.

Sendhil, any thoughts or advice on how to make this work?

SM: I’ve learned not to give advice on the fly! But there is a lot of interesting stuff around urgency and what you do to create it. Tangentially related, there are great findings in behavioral science around couponing. If you send out one coupon with a deadline of a week and another that must be used within the next month, you end up having more redemptions with the one week deadline. It’s really amazing. With the month deadline you have four times as much time, but people tend to say they’ll use it in a few weeks’ time and then they don’t do it. Urgency is a very interesting topic.

AL: We’d also love to figure out how to do this without offering financial reward. I’d love to get your take on it as we progress, Sendhil. In fact, one thought to leave you with — how about asking the TED community to design experiments we can run on real world energy consumers? We feel like we’re just scratching surface of what can be accomplished and would love to get creative, talented people to help designing interventions.

A look at some of Opower’s existing platforms, which will inspire 2 terawatt hours of saved electricity this year.

Sustainable Dance Floor doesn’t just light up—it generates electricity as you dance. Photo: Anneke Hymmen, courtesy of Energy Floors

The average person takes about 150 million steps in a lifetime. What if we could turn all that movement into energy? Two innovators are working on it — including a TED@London speaker. While one has built a system to capture the energy of foot traffic, the other is harnessing the power of smooth dance moves.

Mashable directs our attention to Energy Floors, a groovy company based in Rotterdam that has used dancefloor power to create more than 8 billion joules of electricity so far. In 2008, the team created Club WATT — an ecological dance club with flooring tile that harnesses the ecstatic movements of dancers, converting kinetic energy to actual electricity. Their first big idea: Launch a network of sustainable dance clubs with glowing, interactive floors, while simultaneously launching a line of floor tiles called Sustainable Dance Floor. But as CEO Michel Smit tells the TED Blog, that business model proved unsustainable, so the company shifted its focus toward using dance floors to raise awareness of energy usage.

Enter the Mini Sustainable Dance Club, tiny portable dance clubs that fit six to eight people. These can-shaped rooms are step-activated, so when curious visitors walk up the three stairs, the club ignites into an interactive and intimate experience that gives dancers visual feedback — the more enthusiastic the dancers are about getting into the groove, the more the illuminated illustrations on the walls intensify. When a threshold is reached, a mirrored disco ball spins. These “clubs in a can” can be set up by two people, and are naturally becoming a hit at outdoor festivals.

PaveGen floor tiles catch the energy of everyday walking. Here, they appear in London’s West Ham Underground station. Photo: Courtesy of PaveGen

This idea of regenerative energy flooring is similar to one we’ve seen presented on the TED stage. Laurence Kemball-Cook, a London-based industrial design engineer, was working at one of Europe’s largest energy companies when he set his sights on making the power in cities more sustainable. In a country prone to overcast and mild weather, solar and wind energy are anything but practical. But he had another idea.

During TED’s worldwide talent search stop in London, Kemball-Cook gave a talk about PaveGen, his technology company that develops sustainable flooring tile. The flooring tile, made out of things like recycled truck tires, works to convert the kinetic energy created from a footstep into electrical energy that can light pathways (and even tweet).

After Cook installed PaveGen tiles at music festivals and the 2012 London Olympics, as well as in school hallways, he realized that people were gravitating toward his system because of the instant feedback it gives. Which is exactly what makes the Mini Sustainable Dance Club such a fun idea too.

Taylor Wilson has been called “The Boy Who Played With Fusion” by Popular Science magazine. At age 9, Wilson stunned tour guides at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, with his complex understanding of rocket science. At 12, he set out to make a “star in a jar.” By 14, Wilson had become the youngest person to achieve nuclear fusion with a working reactor. Built in his parents’ garage, the deuterium-hurling device is now housed in the physics department of the University of Nevado, Reno.

At TED2013, Wilson made his second appearance on the TED stage, above. Now 19, he arrived with a bold new idea — a way to make nuclear energy safe and portable, on a scale where it has the potential to address the global energy crisis. In today’s talk, Wilson shares his latest innovation — Small Modular Fission Reactors. These reactors are small, meaning that they can be built in factories and shipped around the globe. They run on already-molten material, so meltdowns won’t be an issue. They’re installed three meters underground, making them hard to tamper with, and yet, in the event of a disaster, the core can be drained to a tank underneath, stopping the reaction. And while traditional nuclear power plants run for 18 months before needing refueling, the small-scale versions could run for up to 30 years, after which they could be sealed for discarding.

To hear how these reactors work — and a few potential applications, from bringing carbon-free energy to the developing world to propelling rockets into space — watch this talk.

A year ago, at TED2012, Wilson took the TED stage to talk about the nuclear fusion reactor he created in his basement. “I would like to make the case that nuclear fusion will be … our energy future,” he says in this talk, “Yup, I built a nuclear fusion reactor.” “I’d also like to make the case that kids can really change the world.”

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Wilson isn’t the only teenager who has shared an energy innovation on the TED stage. At TEDGlobal 2007, William Kamkwamba answered questions about his incredible creation – a homemade windmill he built at age 14.

Kamkwamba set out to make a windmill to bring electricity to his family’s home in rural Malawi. He got the basic plans from a library book, reimagining the design out of spare parts, like a bicycle frame and plastic pipes. Kamkwamba made significant alterations in the design to improve upon it, adding an extra blade to increase the windmill’s power production. In the end, the windmill created 12 watts of energy – enough to power four lightbulbs and two radios in his family’s home.  At TEDGlobal 2009, he returned to the stage to tell the story in more detail in the talk “How I harnessed the wind.”

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After his TED experience, Kamkwamba set his sights on building a bigger windmill to pump water and power irrigation for his entire village. Kwambama’s story was recently the subject of the documentary William and the Windmill, which won the Grand Jury Award at SXSW.

Bill Gross, the founder of Idealab, is an adult now. But in his talk from TED2003, he revealed that he started his first energy company — called Solar Devices — when he was 15 years old, building on what he learned in school about how parabolas could concentrate rays of light onto a single point. At the height of the gas shortage in 1973, Gross developed his own design for a Stirling engine in metal shop.

“I sold the plans for this engine and for this dish in the back of Popular Science magazine, for $4 each,” he says in this talk, “Bill Gross on new energy.” “I earned enough money to pay for my first year of Caltech.”

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Want more talks with ideas for energy (regardless of the speaker’s age)? Watch the TED playlist “The End of Oil.” It begins with Wilson’s talk about his nuclear fusion reactor, continues with Donald Sadoway sharing the missing link to renewable energy, and continues with eight more great ideas for moving beyond our reliance on oil.

William Kamkwamba: How I harnessed the wind

William and the Windmill, directed by Ben Nabors and starring TED’s own Tom Rielly, who became Kamkwamba’s mentor, follows Kamkwamba’s journey from his home in Malawi to Dartmouth College, reflecting on the highs and lows of living between two very different cultures. As IndieWire writes in its rave review of the film, “Kamkwamba’s scientific achievement speaks for itself, but the attention he received in its wake is a thornier issue that Ben Nabors turns into a fascinating look at the tricky balancing act of third-world activism.”

William and the Windmill received recognition last night at SXSW alongside Short Term 12, winner of the Grand Jury Award for Narrative Feature. Below, check out stills from William and the Windmill, courtesy of Nabors. And stay tuned to the TED Blog for a Q&A with Kamkwamba.

Director Ben Nabors accepts the Grand Jury Award on Tuesday night at SXSW.

A still from the film: William hard at work on his windmill.

A still from the film: A windmill from afar.

A still from the film: William, deep in contemplation.

Here, watch the film’s trailer:

And head to the Tribeca Film Institute website to read about 5 films that influenced Nabors as he made this doc »

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Have you checked your email today? Your finances? What about your energy use? Alex Laskey thinks that with just a shift in attitude toward our energy use, we can all save a lot.

Laskey introduces an experiment he ran with his team at Opower. People received one of three different messages on their doors about why they should try to save energy:

– You can save $54 this month
– You can save the planet
or
– You can be a good citizen

Which one won? None. No one message showed a marked difference. So Opower added a fourth message: Your neighbors are doing better than you.

That one worked. The locals who heard the message that 77% of their neighbors turned down their A/C, Also turned down their AC, creating a marked difference in energy consumption. As Laskey says, “If something is inconvenient, even if we believe it, persuasion won’t work. But social pressure? That’s powerful stuff.”

Every year in the U.S. alone $40 billion of energy is wasted. Laskey projects that by thinking not just about material sciences but about behavioral sciences, we could save 2 terawatts a year — more than enough energy to power every home in St. Louis and Salt Lake City for more than a year.

We can be doing so much better, says Laskey, starting by tapping into the power of social behavior.

Alex Laskey’s talk is now available for viewing. Watch it on TED.com»

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Taylor Wilson graduated from high school in May. And Popular Science has already dubbed him “The Boy who Played with Fusion” and Forbes has suggested that he may just be “The Bill Gates of Energy.”

Taylor Wilson: Yup, I built a nuclear fusion reactor Wilson first received attention at the age of 14, after building a nuclear fusion reactor he’d dreamed up in his parents’ garage. He spoke at TED2012 about that experience, and he’s back this year at TED2013 to talk about a new project.

“I realized that the biggest problem we face — what all these other problems come down to — is energy,” says Wilson. “This is a talk about fission — about taking something old and bringing it into the 21st century.”

Wilson has invented Small Modular Fission Reactors. These reactors are small, meaning that they can be built in factories and shipped wherever they need to go. They are installed three meters underground — making them far safer from a counterterrorism standpoint than something aboveground. And these are molten salt reactors, which means that they have the potential to run on the waste from old nuclear weapons — making the wide distribution of this technology a potential way to secure the material from weapon stockpiles.

As Wilson explains, one of the problems with traditional nuclear power plants is that they only run for 18 months before needing refueling. Small Modular Fission Reactors, on the other hand, will run for about 30 years before they run out of juice. This means that they will be a closed system while they are in use, making them safer. And after the 30-year mark, these reactors can be sealed up and discarded.

“Everybody after Fukushima had to reasses the safety of nuclear,” says Wilson. “When I set out to design a reactor, I knew it had to be passive and intrisically safe.”

As Wilson explains, because the material in Small Modular Fission Reactors is already molten, meltdowns won’t be a factor. And in the case of a disaster, the core can be drained to a tank underneath, stopping the reaction.

Wilson is excited about the potential of Small Modular Fission Reactors because they could provide carbon-free electricity for homes and businesses, helping to combat climate change. And because they are produced in factories, for cheap, they may be a way to bring power to the developing world. Wilson excitedly tells TED curator Chris Anderson that he hopes to have Small Modular Fission Reactors to market in five years.

But Wilson sees other potential for these reactors — to fuel scientific exploration in other areas, perhaps even space.

“Imagine having a compact reactor in a rocket that produces 50-100 megawatts. That’s the rocket designer’s dream,” says Wilson. And it isn’t inconceivable, considering that plutonium batteries have been sent into space aboard rockets. “I think there’s something poetic about using nuclear power to propel us to the stars. Because the stars are giant nuclear power reactors themselves.”

Taylor Wilson’s talk is now available for viewing. Watch it on TED.com »

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

The cofounder of PayPal, Elon Musk has become one of his generation’s most aggressive, not to mention successful, entrepreneurs. As CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors and CEO and CTO of SpaceX, his interests clearly lie in transforming transportation and creating an economy built on sustainable energy. Now he takes the TED stage to tell us more.

First, he talks about the genesis of Tesla, his realization while still at university that the development of a sustainable energy system is critical to the ongoing existence of humanity — and therefore a problem worth tackling. And while, yes, these cars require being fed by current electrical systems, his belief is that given the inevitability of electric transportation, perhaps Tesla cars will help to kickstart the genuinely sustainable system necessary to support it. “All modes of transport will become electric, with the ironic exception of rockets. There’s no way around Newton’s third law,” he says. “So the question is how you create a really energy efficient car.” In Tesla’s case, the key is to make it incredibly light, with an aluminum chassis and body made in North America. “We applied rocket design techniques to make the car light, despite the large battery pack.”

Musk clearly isn’t going to talk about his recent spat with the New York Times, but he does want to talk about the range of the car. “Customers of the Model S are competing with each other to get the highest possible range,” he says. 420 miles is apparently the record, though he acknowledges that 250 miles on a single charge is a more likely number. But what he truly loves about the Tesla is the driver experience. “The responsiveness is incredible,” he says. “We want people to feel a mind-meld with the car, that you and the car are one. As you corner, accelerate, it just happens. It’s like the car has ESP.”

But Musk isn’t just here to talk about Tesla. Another string to his energy bow: SolarCity, a company harnessing the power of the “giant fusion generator in the sky,” the sun. Why solar? “I’m confident solar will beat everything hands down, including natural gas. If it doesn’t, we’re in deep trouble.” With this company, Musk is attempting to create no less than a giant, distributed utility, leasing solar panels to homes and companies. “Utilities have been this monopoly and people haven’t had a choice. It’s the first time they have had competition,” he says. “It’s empowering.”

And so to SpaceX, a project Musk jokes might well prove to be the fastest way he can lose his fortune. Despite setbacks, they persist, and when he says the goal of the company is to advance rocket technology and convert humanity into a spacefaring civilization, it’s hard to laugh him off. Especially when he challenges us to consider which we’d prefer: Exploring other planets, or confining ourselves to earth and eventual, inevitable extinction.

The real innovation of SpaceX is to build a reusable rocket. The Space Shuttle was an attempt at this, he says, but it took a 10,000-person group nine months to refurbish a rocket for a flight, at a cost of about $1 billion per flight. That’s not a sustainable business model, and in the past few months Musk and his team have made good progress in designing a rocket that can take off — and land again safely. He shows video of a test, a 12-story-high rocket taking off, hovering at 40 meters, and then magically landing again. The audience is appropriately impressed. Even more so when he tells us that none of the design innovations in the rocket are patented. “Since our primary competitors are national governments, the enforceability of patents is questionable,” he says wryly.

As to how he manages it all, he has three tips for would-be innovators. First, work a lot. Secondly, study physics and learn how to reason from first principles rather than reason by analogy. Finally, he says, pay attention to negative feedback, particularly from friends. “That may sound like simple advice, but hardly anyone does that,” he concludes.

This interview with 60 Minutes from June 2012 is well worth a watch:

Elon Musk’s talk is now available for viewing. Watch it on TED.com»

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Kicking off the TED conference would be a daunting prospect for most, but Jennifer Granholm has tackled both nastier challenges and less friendly audiences in her time. After all, she is the former governor of Michigan, a state that, as the blurb to her book A Governor’s Story: The Fight for Jobs and America’s Economic Future puts it, was “synonymous with manufacturing during a financial crisis that threatened to put all America’s major car companies into bankruptcy.” TED? For Granholm? A piece of cake–and an opportunity to air her theme of how to foster meaningful innovation at state level, and to lay down a challenge for the assembled TEDsters.

But first, she wants to share three enigmas. First: how do you create good jobs in America? Granholm has a story to share, featuring empirical data from her first year in office in Michigan in 2003. The 8,000-person-strong community of Greenville, Michigan, was about to lose its major employer, an Electrolux refrigerator factory. 3,000 jobs were set to be lost when the company moved its operation to Mexico. “Not on my watch,” said Granholm.

Off she went with her cabinet to convince Electrolux to stay. Proposed incentives included: zero taxes for 20 years! A new factory! The UAW would offer unprecedented sacrifices! Management, she tells us, considered the proposal for all of 17 minutes before unceremoniously rejecting it. None of the incentives made any difference when salaries in Mexico were $1.75 an hour. So Electrolux left, and Greenville’s longstanding manufacturing-based culture was decimated. “All I know how to do is make refrigerators. Who is ever going to hire me?” asked one worker, echoing those from the 50,000 factories closed between 2000 and 2010. It’s a sobering point.

Granholm’s next two enigmas include two minor challenges. First, how do you solve global climate change? Second, how do you do any of this with Congressional gridlock? After all, she jokes, Congress is rated worse than cockroaches, lice, Nickelback and Donald Trump (though better than meth labs and gonorrhea). The audience loves this.

Now Granholm points us to an Obama administration policy that did cause massive changes across the country — the “Race to the Top for Education.” This $4.5 billion proposal prompted competition among 48 states and caused many voluntary changes across America. The price of entry was that governors had to raise their college standards–and Granholm wonders if we couldn’t do the same kind of thing with clean energy.

After all, $1.6 trillion has been invested in that sector; but most of that has not been in the United States. Couldn’t a similar prize competition prompt real action? When the President is calling for 80% clean energy by 2030, couldn’t the states take on that challenge instead? And could the prize be the same $4.5 billion budget afforded to the education prize? The figure is, after all, a rounding error on the federal side.

“Each region has something to offer,” Granholm details. “Iowa and Ohio could lead in wind energy. The sunbelt could produce solar energy for the country. Jerry Brown could create a solar cluster in California. Every region of the country could do this.”

“If you create a competition, it respects the states, it respects federalism,” she adds. “And both Republican and Democratic governors love to cut ribbons; they want to create jobs. It fosters innovation at the state level.”

So how do we pay for it when Congress can’t agree on anything? “Go around them,” she says simply. And now, her challenge. “What if we created a private-sector challenge to the governors?” she asks. “What if several of the high-net-worth individuals or companies here at TED decided to band together to create a national competition to the governors to have a race to the top?” The audience giggles, but a smattering of applause shows that they’re paying close attention. “What if it all started here at TED? What if you were here when we figured out how to crack the code to create good paying jobs here in America, to create an energy policy, and create an energy strategy from the bottom up?” More applause. There’s a sense in the room that this could really happen.

“If you’re impatient, as I am,” Granholm concludes, “You know our competitors are in the game and eating us for lunch. We can get in the game or not. We can be at the table or on the table. I don’t know about you, but I prefer to dine.”

Jennifer Granholm’s talk is now available for viewing. Watch it here»

Air conditioning used to be a luxury — but as Doris Kim Sung points out in this talk from TEDxUSC, modernized society has become thoroughly air-conditioning reliant.

This is largely a problem of materials, says Sung, a professor at the USC School of Architecture. Many new buildings — especially skyscrapers — are built with floor-to-ceiling windows, which means that the spaces inside are constantly heated by the greenhouse effect and that the windows cannot be opened to let in a breeze. But could there be a smarter material that is better able to regulate inside temperature?

Sung — who studied biology before she became an architect — has given herself the challenge of creating a metal that acts like human skin, in which pores and sweat glands work together to provide cooling.  She has created a thermo-bimetal that bends and flexes depending on outside temperature, without using any energy at all. Crafted into interlocking strips, these thermo-bimetals warp in the sun to form a canopy that shades an area, while leaving openings for ventilation. Having tested the strips in installations (check out her sculpture “Bloom”), Sung now imagines using them in the creation of new buildings, as well as in replacement windows that could be fitted into existing ones. Thermo-bimetals could potentially replace curtains and shutters, providing privacy while also lowering air-conditioner reliance.

“When you’re tired of opening and closing those blinds day after day, when you’re on vacation and there’s no one on the weekends to turn off the controls, or when there’s a power outage and there’s no electricity to rely on, these thermo-bimetals will still be working tirelessly, efficiently and endlessly,” says Sung.

To see exactly how these thermo-bimetals work and to hear about how Sung is also taking inspiration from eyelashes and grasshoppers for new materials, watch her talk. Below, a few other TED speakers who also have creative ideas for how to keep us cool.

Wolfgang Kessling: How to air-condition outdoor spaces Wolfgang Kessling: How to air-condition outdoor spaces In June of 2022, Qatar will host the World Cup. Wolfgang Kessling has been tasked with creating an open-air stadium for the event that will keep both fans and players comfortable in the 106F/41C heat. In this talk from the TEDxSummit in Doha, Kessler explains that the plan isn’t to blast air conditioning, but to use innovative shading as well as chilled water piped through the stadium’s floor. (Read the TED Blog’s roundup of five public spaces with surprising cooling systems.)

Kamal Meattle: How to grow fresh air Kamal Meattle: How to grow fresh air As activist Kamal Meattle shared at TED2009, it is possible to grow your own air indoors. He explains how three common household plants — Areca palm, Mother-in-law’s tongue and the Money plant — can be placed in specific spots in a home or office to dramatically improve the air quality.

Thom Mayne: How architecture can connect us Thom Mayne on architecture as connection Architecture is about the world of ideas bumping up with the limitations of reality, says architect Thom Mayne. At TED2005, he takes us on a tour of some of the buildings he’s created, including an office in San Francisco whose tower has no air conditioning at all. Instead, it uses a skin that moves on hydraulics, forcing air through it.

Watch Saul Griffith’s talk from TED2009 on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 400+ TEDTalks — including more tales of invention.

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William Kamkwamba, a young Malawi man who designed and built a windmill for his family when he was 14 — and who spoke so memorably at TEDGlobal Africa this June — is profiled on the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal in a story headined “A Young Tinkerer Builds a Windmill, Electrifying a Nation.” Writer Sarah Childress adds detail to the story that Kamkwamba told onstage in Tanzania:

Mr. Kamkwamba’s wind obsession started six years ago. He wasn’t going to school anymore because his family couldn’t afford the $80-a-year tuition.

When he wasn’t helping his family farm groundnuts and soybeans, he was reading. He stumbled onto a photograph of a windmill in a text donated to the local library and started to build one himself.

There’s also a great 2-minute video that shows the updates Kamkwamba has made to his family’s home power system, and talks about what’s next for him:

Video: Writer Sarah Childress from the Wall Street Journal talks to William Kamkwamba, a 20-year-old Malawian who built a windmill to power his family’s home.
Image courtesy Wall Street Journal

The first speaker, Michael Oppenheimer, began by saying: “I’m the depressing, immobilizing part of the talk.” He went on to make this point: While Hurricane Katrina can’t be directly tied to climate change, it did teach us one thing:

You can’t count on the government to save you from global warming. They’re still inept to this day, and half an American city is gone, and how the hell are we going to deal with this? And what are we doing instead?

He puts up a devastating slide of the hyperdevelopment on the beach at Atlantic City — which would lose 100 feet of beachfront if global sea levels rise 1 foot, as they will.

Alternative energy expert Martin Hoffert is a staunch advocate for getting off fossil fuels altogether. He spun out one scenario:

Let me say a few words about space solar power. The advantage of putting solar collectors in orbit: The sun is basically shining 24/7. We already have thousands of satellites up there — suppose you could build a transmitting antenna in orbit that would beam energy down to collectors, beaming energy using lasers (not microwaves) from geostationary orbit? We could send it up in one launch vehicle, and power a village, maybe in Africa, to demonstrate the viability of solar power. We could do this in 3 to 5 years.

Environmental scientist David Keith talked about geoengineering — dramatic, cheap solutions to a warming atmosphere, such as blowing a Mt. Pinatubo-size cloud of sulfur into the sky to bring the global temperature down. Such ideas seem overly dramatic, and even immoral, but they are out there, and he argues:

We should move this out of the shadows and talk about this seriously, because sooner or later we will be confronted with a decision on this. We would do [geoengineering] instead of cutting emissions, instead of mitigation, because it’s cheaper. It’s very cheap. It’s not a GOOD idea, but that’s how big the [incentive] is. That is not in dispute, though we might argue over the sanity of it …

Russ George, the chief scientist of Planktos, offered a way to think about all the factors contributing to the larger issue of climate change:

We have a bunch of aberrant applications in this planet, jamming a lot of errors against that primary operating system, and it’s threatening to reboot and give us that blue screen of death, threatening a reboot back to 16 million years ago.

Juan Enriquez (pictured above) talked about how much of our energy, such as coal and oil — made from ancient plants — is simply “concentrated sunlight.” How can we get to the point where we grow our own energy as efficiently as we grow wheat? Looking at a photo of a pile of surplus grain, Enriquez notes:

That would probably be a good outcome for energy.

Photo of Juan Enriquez by Myrna Suarez, Condé Nast Portfolio

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