Making Faster Than Light Travel Safer (for the people at your destination)

The Alcubierre drive is currently considered one of the most plausible means of an intelligent life form creating a faster than light vessel.  Needless to say, this is awesome.  Unfortunately there are some potential risks that come with violently bending the universal speed limit of light.  In rough terms, the way an Alcubierre drive would work involves warping space time.  By expanding space time behind the space craft, while simultaneously contracting space time in front of the vessel, the ship is able to isolate itself from the universe at large and get from point A to point B really fast.  So while this is really awesome, the contracting of space time at the front of the ship has a strong potential to become a rather dangerous weapon, the contracted space time would pull in dust and gases through out the journey, forming a super dense plasma, when space time returns to normal, all of the energy in that plasma is released, potentially fatally for the planets in the star system the ship was trying to visit.
Generally speaking, explorers aren't trying to kill the star systems they are visiting, to prevent the built up energy from being destructive, there are a few options.  One simply aim the ship so that when you stop, you are unlikely to kill anyone with the blast of energy.  Two limit your travels to relatively short hops, minimizing how much energy is built up.  Three (my idea), create a pocket universe in front of your ship.  A group advanced enough to create a faster than light ship, might also be advanced enough to create artificial pocket universes.  These artificial pocket universes could be generated right in front of the ship, providing a temporary storage volume for untold quantities of energy, ideally, the super hot plasma would be stored in the pocket universe where the energy could be slowly let out.  This torrent of energy could assist in allowing the ship to power up when it moves on to the next star system.

Gauging the Truth in the News

Currently more of a nugget of an idea than anything else, but I would love to see an app or service, similar to shazam, so that when I hear a news report on one of the major networks, I can see their reference materials and ideally as much information from their sources.  As it is unlikely that anyone could absorb all of that information in real-time, users could book mark stories that they are interested in following up on, and at a later time the app would allow them to look back on stories.

Future iterations could start to account for statements made by major political candidates, using services like politifact and (ideally) alternative data sources, a user could ask about candidate A's accuracy in presenting the facts on the benefits of space exploration budgeting.  On another day users could see if candidate B has changed their stance on fossil fuel subsidies and whether or not those changes are a closer match to their own.  Truly wishful thinking would be that the app/service could provide a reasonable estimate on how likely Candidate C is to actually stick to their campaign promises, I would only find this feature acceptable if it clearly communicated any publicly stated rationals behind why that stance was changed, or why they didn't vote for that initiative.  Politics is a messy game and it should not be trivialized to make people feel better.

HOMES OF THE FUTURE!!!

Near the end of last year (2015) I said that I would make some predictions for the future.  Well I am taking a breather from learning to code to start fulfilling my obligation to you the reader.  

This section is to propose things that I believe are reasonably possible over the next 50 years, in many cases sooner (assuming consumer demand).

Our first prediction will be the most obvious, the majority of single family homes will be net producers of electrical energy for the world's power grids.  In most cases their ability to benefit the grid will stem from roof-top solar and a collection of batteries (honestly if this isn't the case for the American SouthWest in 15 years, I am going to be upset.)  While solar and batteries are an  excellent start they should not be the full picture, our current means of handling waste food and waste water are incredibly, wait for it, wasteful.  There are any number of statistics on the net food value thrown in the trash by average American households in a given year.  Ideally out understanding of technologies like bio-reactors, will allow households to convert their biodegradable waste into intelligently composted soil and a certain amount of methane that can be used to supply power from either a fuel cell or a more traditional combustion power plants.  In cooler regions where wood burning stoves are more common, the waste heat from the chimney combined with the cold air outside, might be used for generating power via a thermo-electric generator.

The idea of a home scale bio reactor has the potential to drastically increase the overall resilience of communities, waste water could be treated by the bio reactor system, turning black water into grey water, suitable for the water used in toilets and watering the lawn.  In theory, we could create home scale water recycling systems that could take water containing human waste and make it pure enough to comfortably drink, convincing people to drink something that was poo less than a week ago, much harder to do.  The phrase "home bio-reactor" would most likely represent a multitude of complimentary elements, the sum total of these parts could treat impure water, grow bio-fuels, as well as algal food stocks that could support local and/or regional animal food production.  

(A theme I feel I keep going back to in this post, is embracing multiple uses, and ideally the potential for small scale income from one's property. I hope you are inspired to have some different thoughts)

Continuing the theme of making something that can be consumed on the local level.  Robotic farming has the potential to turn your back yard into an incredibly bountiful source of fruits and vegetables.  Even in the next 50 years robot farmers are unlikely to be cheap enough so that every home would actually own an individual farmbot.  I find it more likely that robots would be owned by a 3rd party, rented  out hourly, or in the case of poorer regions of world, it might be something akin to rooftop solar, where an outside party gets permission from the land owner to farm a certain area, in exchange they have access to the future equivalent of our current farm shares.  (the above paragraph was inspired by this post)

One cool trend that I would like to see more of is the idea of using the waste heat from servers to keep homes and schools warm.  As fiber-optic lines to the home become more common it will become easier to implement even more impressive distributed services.  It is possible to imagine that homes would have designated spaces in the basement, garage, what have you... where the homeowner can rent out space for distributed services.  They might be server racks (or their future equivalents), large scale batteries for storing surplus grid energy (beyond what the home needs), rapid prototyping capacity, inventory storage, the possibilities are tremendous.  The intent of these distributed nodes is to take advantage of our ability to handle a more complicated world.  Ideally we would need fewer designated server farms, grid scale battery facilities, resource recycling ... who knows what single use buildings we can get rid of.

Clutter has the potential to take disappear (or at least get more manageable), smart warehouses are already revolutionizing how companies like Amazon manage their inventory, over the next 50 years smarter technologies will make it possible to do away with junk drawers and chaotic attics.   Robotic platforms with the ability to learn what an object is and what the object is used for.  Now your seasonal decorations can be comfortably boxed up, and when you need your holiday display, the home will queue up your inventory at your convenience.  Knick knacks can be sorted and stored as time goes on if you don't look for a given knick knack the system can ask you, "Hey do you want to keep this item or should I try to donate or sell it?"  Items in storage could also be added to a community searchable database, have a bike that you don't use very often?  your house is going to help you get some kind of benefit off that bike.

Hopefully our culture will come to better grips with the importance of battling climate change, and the design of homes will be more sustainable, beyond solar power and passive design.  Making homes from more sustainable resources, be it bamboo, wood, compacted dirt, or any number of other approaches. 

The small house movement will certainly ebb and flow over the next several decades, during the next 20 years small communities of retirees living in tiny houses with a number of communal resources will become popular, how long it stays that way is another story entirely.  Urban living is the most likely to benefit from the de-cluttering technology, smart apartment complexes will minimize the amount of space devoted to storage, as well as reduce the number of redundant, but underused, items in a home, example, dishwashers, most of the time, you need to use your dishwasher once every 1 to 2 days, in a smart apartment building you could drop off your dishes into a series of trays, a robot is summoned to pick up the dishes, and a few hours later clean dishes are returned to you.  You have that extra space in the apartment, the building has a selling point, and the environment benefits from the most efficient dishwasher possible being used.  Laundry services might also take a similar vein, but it will take longer for the system to be smart enough to properly sort things.

Ok I am going to take a pause from this post, any thoughts or ideas are welcome.

Energy Audits for Rental Properties

This idea is on the vaguer end of the spectrum (shocking for a guy like me), the vagueness stems from not having a deep enough concept of how policies are rated, anyway enough of me covering my ass.

One of the challenges I have had while being a renter in the Greater Boston area, is the lack of information when it comes to energy costs.  As someone who likes to at least pretend that they care about the environment, I wish that when I looked at an apartment there was a fact sheet that included a rough grading of how energy efficient the apartment was.  Ideally, for me, this grade would focus on a few critical factors, how much energy does it take to heat or cool a given square footage, how much energy transferred between the home and the outside world (basically how good is the insulation), and what are the base line electricity demands of the appliances in the home (read how efficient is the apartment's refrigerator/ other appliances that came with the place).  Something like these variables would be translated into a letter grade, if the letter grade is too low the property owner would be required to invest in energy efficiency improvements.

Implementation would be challenging to say the least, in cities with a large volume of rental properties, doing the assessments could get rather costly.  To help pay for inspections, utility companies could work with the community to promote analysis, in this way all parties can win, the utility can minimize energy used by residencies, land lords would have a way to promote their properties, and renters would be able to factor in energy costs with their decision to rent a particular property.  Ideally these assessments would occur on a regular cycle, the length of said cycle is hard to know, my personal starting suggestion would be something like this, no property can have gone for more than 10 years with out an inspection, if said property is found to have been rented to individuals there would be legal consequences for the property owner.  Preferably every 5 years there would be an assessment, this should ensure that upkeep doesn't fall too far behind.