Post Boredom Society

Many futurists discuss the concept of post scarcity societies, a place where the means of production are so capable, a person will not encounter a sense of need for almost any physical object or amount of energy.  Hopefully that day will come sooner than later, but before that day comes, I would like to postulate we are at the beginnings of a precursor to post scarcity, the concept of post boredom.  In our day to day lives, at least in the more affluent parts of the world, we have access to an unimaginable volume of distractions, entertainments, and knowledge.  Most of us no longer have the same sense of boredom that we had 20 years ago, if you are waiting for something to happen we have the ability to distract and amuse ourselves.  While the various boredom prevention tools are imperfect, they do represent a word where information is less and less scarce.


This post was inspired by some ramblings I had with my friend Andrew, I'm honestly not sure what it means on a deeper cultural level, just a personal observation on where it feels we are.  Within another 20 years as smart phones and internet access reaches true global saturation, it will be interesting to see what this will mean to our society.

I want it on the record

So this is a reminder to myself to make a fuller post sometime before the new year (2016), but I wanted this one to be on the record, so hopefully some day in the future I can get called out for being either too cynical on the creativity of humanity, or naively optimistic.

It is my opinion, that by 2069 humanity will have  a permanent presence in orbit around Mars, ideally using the surfaces of Phobos and/or Deimos as their base of operations.  These permanent bases will be akin to research stations in Antarctica and the ISS, crewed by humans, but still dependent on the resources of a logistics center to survive.  These bases will host mining operations, limited food growth infrastructure, and so many research sensors.

I know I am one voice saying this, but world, please prove me wrong in the best way possible.  Push the frontiers of human exploration and presence.  The universe feels too empty, let us reach out to the stars and feel the warmth of a thousand suns.

Making Universal Translators Lazy in Sci-Fi

A common trope in science fiction stories is that most species have some kind of universal translator that removes at least one barrier of communication between species.  Here's my quick question, why have tv producers not embraced characters mouths not syncing up with the audio, considering each party is hearing the audio differently, would it not make sense for their mouths to not move in a predictable fashion, this would make over dubbing so easy, and you could localize the show super duper easy.

This quick rant was inspired by stories of the teleporter in Star Trek The Original Series, which was created as the production company did not have the resources to actually make landing vehicles that would appear on set locations.  While my suggestion would be a cost saving, I really doubt it would inspire any cool creations.

Modular Home Lighting

I meant to write this post awhile ago, and the ideas are a little disjoint, but I would like to get something out there.

Home lighting in developing countries is a huge economic bottleneck, too many households need to focus on solutions that are low cost in the short term, even though the long term costs are much higher, things like candles, kerosene lamps, or battery powered flashlights.  Any number of NGOs and for profits have worked to develop a range of lighting technologies that will help make the home lives of their users better.  One potentially new concept to promote these lighting technologies is designing a product that can be equally at home serving as the very first electric light-source that person has ever used or as the lighting solution of a modern home.  This can be done by rethinking the LED lighting solution, the vast majority of home LED solutions take advantage of the 100+ year old Edison screw design, this makes sense if you are utilizing older infrastructure, but we are in an era where design rules are changing and there are new connection standards that can make more sense, for example the USB 3.1 C standard.  This standard will soon be ubiquitous across almost the entire planet, and unlike the Edison screw, the voltage and amperage characteristics will be equally consistent from nation to nation.  Engineers could work to create lighting elements that distribute power via USB cables and connections types, and to avoid overloading the power distribution capabilities of the cables, bulbs could be designed to include simple communication protocols that would warn users of low power, excessive draw, etc...

11/16/15 my brain is a little disjoint right now but I wanted to get this idea down. Broad strokes, create an open standard that uses a smart connection type, it doesn't have to be USB 3.1C, but honestly it makes the most sense with that hole 100 watts of power transfer range and what not.  Lighting modules don't need to be exactly the same, but they should have some minimums, shared micro-controller standards, simple and standardized power requirements, easy thermal management, basically if lighting unit A is next to B in normal operating temps, they should stay fine, without any external cooling system, a way for bulbs to efficiently distribute power across bulbs, think femto electrical grids.

The entire rational of this design is that if a community invests in this lighting system, as money becomes more available they can improve their solution, going from small lamps to more traditional overhead lights, all while up-cycling the original components of the small lamp.

11/20/15

LED bottom

I finally made a proper initial render of what this lighting system could look like.  Both as a single light source and grouped together.  The 8 points on the bottom of the Sub lighting element are one approach to the lighting systems power and communication contacts, with a similar chip element to what is found in the thunderbolt connector type (found in devices like the iPhone) it won't matter which way the lighting element is plugged into its power supply, the lights will work)  On the top you have 7 LEDs they will provide light as well as a means of diagnoses, depending on how many LEDs are illuminated and in what pattern, users will have a means of determining where power issues are occurring, when a module is nearing the end of its life, or other information.  Aside from the full on and full off values, the bulb could potentially have over points of data that could be communicated, assuming you don't worry about rotational symmetry.

LED top.

 
As I refine this idea I can add more details, as well as better models.  The critical question is maximizing functionality while keeping per unit costs as low as possible.  Additional questions on thermal performance of the bulb configuration are worth investigating.

Multiple lighting elements grouped together/

Is your civilization cockroach-ie enough?

There are several quantitative ways to measure a civilization, how much energy it can produce, how much unique data has it recorded and can manipulate, all well and good, but how does one indicate how hard a civilization, or species for that matter is too exterminate?  What I would like to suggest is a new qualitative scale indicating how hard it is to cause a complex system to shut down.  One means of describing this scale could be what major group didn't survive an extinction level event.  Species that are in a rather precarious position could be compared to the dinosaurs, civilizations that have spread out to multiple planets in their solar system would be cockroaches, and those groups that have colonized a large swath of the galaxy would be the microbes.  This scale is currently just an outline and more useful for sci-fi authors putting things into a scale, but who knows maybe we will start designating the aliens we meet throughout the galaxy by an index similar to this.