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What is the next great wholly new technological innovation?

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Chris OConnor

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What is the next great wholly new technological innovation?

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I'm a member of Mensa and in the monthly "Bulletin" magazine they ask questions to the readers. I'm going through the questions from the past several months and will be posting the ones I find interesting here on BookTalk.org.

What is the next great wholly new technological innovation?
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johnson1010
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Re: What is the next great wholly new technological innovation?

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real artificial intelligence will be the next great leap.

when computers can start to contribute to the process of invention itself, then we will really be off and running.
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Re: What is the next great wholly new technological innovation?

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Chris OConnor wrote:What is the next great wholly new technological innovation?
My vote is my invention of Large Scale Ocean Based Algae Production System (Powerpoint 10MB)

Here is a picture of possible locations, from the powerpoint.

Image

I got some comments on it from scientists, and provided this explanation

If a large scale ocean based algae production system will produce an output that is roughly 1% dry weight algae and 99% water, then running ten centimetres of water across the surface to gain this concentration will give 10 tonnes of algae per hectare, in a time period to be determined. The aim would be to achieve this result per day, through varietal cultivation in an optimised industrial environment.

Algae has potential to produce ten or more times higher yield than land based crops. Intensive industrial methods have immense productive potential to increase these estimated yields even further, especially within the Manhattan Apollo Climate Security Project context that we need to reverse global warming. If pilot methods can be scaled up to a level offering material global benefits for ocean ecology, there will be security benefits for energy, climate, food, biodiversity, economic growth and political stability. It would be great to work with big conservative clients like the US Navy Great Green Fleet or oil companies such as Chevron.

An algae manufactory 100 square kilometres in size, with the aim of increasing further by orders of magnitude, would eventually be funded by its commodity outputs. It could also help insure against the multiple climate related threats to local environments such as Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, which is now at high risk from heat, acid and nutrient.

For operation on such a big scale, an automated method is needed to separate the water from the algae, minimising cost and risk. Automated concentration of algae at least cost can aim to compete with coal, gas and oil on price in order to use algae for energy within a negative emission economy. My hypothesis is that wave and tidal power can provide pumping energy to achieve commercially viable energy production at scale from algae, with the aim that all nutrient, CO2, energy, fabric, sites and other material inputs should be available in the ocean at low or no cost.

This business model should be commercially competitive, and more so when eventually fossil fuels pay their externalities. For example, as a related idea, coal fired electricity stations in China could pump their CO2 to algae farms at sea to form a closed loop of fuel production, cleaning the air, removing the need to buy coal, and reducing emissions. My view is that this CO2 pumping could be achieved at least cost using tidal energy.

For now the aim should be purely scientific research and development. None of my ideas have been through any proof of concept peer review process. I would be glad to be able to work on this broad topic, as I proposed in my MIT geoengineering finalist concept. For example, a public private partnership with Chevron Australia could explore these ideas as a way to obtain commercial benefit from the CO2 co-produced with gas on Australia’s North West Shelf, partnering between Australia, Timor Leste and Indonesia to store carbon as recoverable algae in the 3km deep Timor Trench.

Building on the OMEGA membrane concept, an algae manufactory on the near shore continental shelf can pump its output into a secondary bag for further algae growth. This second bag could be floated to the edge of the continental shelf. The living algae contents of this bag could then be pumped into a vertical membrane pipe, permeable to water but not to algae, going down to storage several kilometres below the ocean surface.

My supposition is that sinking algae to this depth in a membrane tube will push all water out, leaving only the algae at the bottom, by force of pressure due to the weight of new algated water pumped in at the top of the tube. This will enable the algae to be completely dewatered so it will not rot, and the algae will form a stable permanent concentrated hydrocarbon product with multiple possible uses. A pipe narrowing to one metre in diameter could produce concentrated algae that could be stored in the deep ocean rolled on spools or collected in a sealed spherical bladder. Wave and tidal energy can be used to raise this stored bank of carbon to the surface.

Deep ocean storage in this model is an intermediate processing step, minimising the cost and complexity of concentrating the hydrocarbon product. The stored algae can then be used for fuel, food, fertilizer and fabric.
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Re: What is the next great wholly new technological innovation?

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I think we're on the bleeding edges of the next tech innovation, which is printing. Print manufacturing will fundamentally change the way we build stuff. Nanotechnology is somewhere close behind. Information teleportation will happen at some point, making communications undetectable. Electronic integration with people will likely come around the same time, when the fields of biology and electronics overlap enough. PCB's need to be entirely biocompatible with an interface that learns with the user. Organic dendrites that grow their way into synapses. Laser energy transmission will blossom when we establish a base on the moon or mars.
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