What will the world be like in 60 years? Back in the 1950s, people speculated that by now we would be flying around in commuter-copters, striding rivers with man-made sea-legs, and living in climate-controlled bubble cities.
As visiting thinker Chris Luebkeman said to an audience at University of New South Wales, "the future is fundamentally fiction." However, it's still an interesting thing to consider, and here, delivering a lecture as part of the university's BrainFood series, Dr. Luebkeman indulged in some fascinating speculation.
Bio
Matthew England
Matthew England is a physical oceanographer and climate scientist who was born in Sydney on June 11, 1966. He holds a B.Sc. and a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Sydney, Australia.
In 2005 he became a Professor at the University of New South Wales, and was awarded an Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship that same year.
Dr. Chris Luebkeman
Chris Luebkeman is director for Global Foresight + Innovation at Arup, a consulting firm of engineers and designers. Educated as a geologist, structural engineer, and architect, Luebkeman now specializes as a generalist. He has taught at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the University of Oregon, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Luebkeman is currently working with some of the world's leading companies to develop future scenarios to better understand the opportunities created by change in the built environment. While at Arup, he has led over 100 workshops exploring the potential impact of key drivers of change within sectors including hotels and leisure, banking, and retail.
Dr. Adrian Paterson
Dr. Adrian Paterson is the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation's newly appointed Chief Executive Officer. Previously, he was general manager, Business Development and Operations, at the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor Company in South Africa. He has a BSc in Chemistry and a PhD in Engineering from the University of Cape Town.
Dr. Paterson brings strong scientific credentials, especially in the field of materials science, wide experience in working with government and contributing to national policy development, attractive partnering and commercialization skills, and a successful history of technical leadership and organizational change.
In addition to his BSc in Chemistry and a PhD in Engineering, Dr. Paterson undertook a post-doc at the University of Leeds in the UK and the Program for Management Development at Harvard Business School. He has supervised Masters and PhD students and is a Member of the Academy of Science of South Africa and the South African Academy of Engineering.
Alec Tzannes
Alec Tzannes is the Faculty Dean of UNSW Built Environment. He is also Director of Tzannes Associates, which has received more than 40 major state and national awards, including Australia's top award for new residential work, the RAIA Robin Boyd Award. Some of Prof. Tzannes's best known projects include the Federation Pavilion and Federation Place at Centennial Park, Overflow Park at Homebush, Aria, Centennial and Bistro Moncur restaurants, commercial buildings in Surry Hills, Woollahra and Double Bay and numerous residential works such as the John Symond residence.
Tzannes has been a member of numerous boards and committees, including design panels for Sydney Olympic Park, Centennial Park and Moore Park Trust. He is a Member of the Historic Houses Trust and of the NSW Public Library Architecture Foundation. He has published widely and lectures regularly around Australia. The NSW Public Library holds many original drawings and sketchbooks of his work.
He is a graduate of the University of Sydney, where he completed a Bachelor of Science and a Bachelor of Architecture (winning the University Medal), and has a Master of Science (Architecture and Urban Design) from Columbia University.
Dr. Chris Luebkeman outlines four different "plausible futures" for the planet -- the selfish bubble, carbon is crime, ecological age, and vortex of despair.
He judges each of these potential futures in terms of human development and planetary health.
Study of current trends in order to forecast future developments. The field originated in the “technological forecasting” developed near the end of World War II and in studies examining the consequences of nuclear conflict. Studies in the 1960s sought to anticipate future social patterns and needs. The Limits of Growth by Dennis Meadows, et al. (1972), focused on global socioeconomic trends, projecting a Malthusian vision in which the collapse of the world order would result if population growth, industrial expansion, pollution, food production, and natural-resource use continued at current rates. Later reports reiterated many of these concerns, with critics contending that futurologists' models were flawed and futurologists responding that their analytic techniques were becoming increasingly sophisticated. Other notable works include Alvin Toffler's Future Shock (1970), Daniel Bell's The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth (1982), and Nigel Calder's The Green Machines (1986).
