2050, anyone?

Here's an assertion: a list of advancements I expect to see in the next 30 years. These are technology advances that push the boundaries of what's feasible. The gap between the feasible and the current is not the topic here. As a result, already-feasible items like solving water shortages are not in this list.

The structure of this list is to state the boundary that's being attacked and list a few methods that are attacking it.

1. No shortage of materials
1. New materials from the labs, continuing the tradition of metallurgy & materials sciences
2. Nanotechnology and bio-mimicry to get new properties in existing materials
3. Better mineral discovery and extraction on Earth
4. More minerals from mining asteroids
2. No shortage of energy (primary and stored energy)
1. Primary energy
1. Small modular conventional nuclear power plants
2. Molten salt thorium cycle nuclear power plants
3. Fast breeder nuclear power plants
4. Bugs that create fuel (e.g., "oil from algae")
2. Stored energy
1. Ammonia or other man-made nitro-chemicals used as fuel
2. Better batteries (liquid, solid-state, etc.)
3. Brain interfaces with technology (TV remotes, computer keyboards, prosthetics, war-machines, brain-to-brain connections, etc.)
4. Ubiquitous high speed telecom
5. Virtual reality and mixed reality (augmented reality)
6. Lots of AI (intelligent assistants)
7. Life-extension technologies
8. Personal-capability enhancements (prosthetics, genome, drugs, bugs/biome, etc.)
9. Garbage/waste elimination (recycle/reuse/re-nature)
1. Recycle fertilizers, nuclear waste, etc.
2. Reuse metals, minerals, etc.
3. Re-nature (degrade back to non-toxic chemicals) drugs, plastics, etc.
1. Bugs/plants/fungi that eat plastics and other currently non-degradable materials
2. Biodegradable materials

Survive, Thrive, Nurture: an agenda in a slogan

There are so many things to do, so how can we determine priorities? Musing on it, I thought it useful to make a tree of concerns, so that any concern can be added to the tree and put in context.

The concerns must scale from the personal to the universal. So here's my list:

0. Decide: determine what to do
1. Individual decisions
2. Shared-value decisions (e.g., most organizational decisions)
3. Value-exploration decisions (values/objectives are up for debate, e.g., in democratic governance decisions)
1. Survive: as an individual, family, tribe, race, or species
1. A supervolcano eruption, solar super-flare, gamma ray burst, asteroid-hit or comet-hit wipes out life on Earth's surface
2. Global warming destroys lots of humans (the carbon cycle) caused by mismanagement of agriculture, energy, and transportation technologies
3. Disease destroys lots of humans
1. Bad civil engineering leads to public health impacts (e.g., from bad water, bad sewage, road accidents, building collapses, malaria-breeding-ponds, etc.) ... often hidden inside data on deaths caused by infectious diseases such as malaria, TB, etc.and deaths from large-scale accidents (homes collapse in an earthquake because they weren't up to code, floods occur because of badly designed water management systems, etc.
2. Bad chemical engineering leads to public health impacts (e.g., from chemical pollution, etc.) ... sometimes visible in cancers and hormonal diseases
3. Bad public health management ... often hidden inside data on deaths caused by infectious diseases and lifestyle diseases (cardiovascular, liver, diabetes, respiratory, digestive, sexually transmitted diseases, etc.)
4. Bad energy & environmental engineering (causing air, land, and water pollution) ... deaths lurk inside lung disease, heart disease, and cancer statistics
5. Antibiotic resistance
6. Anti-vaccine idiots cause a resurgence of old diseases
7. New mutant diseases (H1N1, super-flu, etc.)
4. War, Insurgency, Murder, Manslaughter, Judicial Decree, Terrorism
1. Murder, Manslaughter, and Terrorism
2. War, Organized Crime, Civil War, and Insurgencies
3. Judicial decree (the death penalty)
4. New weapons (biological, nanotech or AI/drone) that may make existing conflicts more grievous
5. Famine (the nitrogen & phosphorous cycles, non-sustainable agriculture, monoculture crop wipe-out by disease, ecological breakdown, etc.)
6. Water shortage (mostly stupid water-wasting projects)
7. Accidents
1. Road (traffic) accidents
2. Industrial accidents
3. Domestic accidents
4. Natural disasters: earthquakes, floods, volcanoes
8. Suicide
9. Personal (biological) lifespan extension
2. Thrive: to improve the standard of living in various different ways
1. Sufficient food, clothing and shelter for everyone 
2. Access to energy, healthcare, education, transportation
3. Removal of parasitic losses in provision of goods and services (where funds or goods are diverted before they reach the beneficiaries, such as free state services becoming unavailable due to absenteeism and low productivity of state employees, siphoning of funds from state projects, electricity transmission losses, deliberate bad loan origination by banks, etc.)
4. Better health
5. More leisure time
6. Better food and drink
7. Better enjoyment & entertainment
3. Nurture: to help others (including other species or objects) to survive and thrive
1. Pets and domestic animals
2. Plants and animals of agricultural, commercial, and aesthetic value
3. All life on Earth
4. All life in the Universe

Urbanization, farming, and water

Can we support a projected population of 180 crores (1.8 billion) without a crisis in food, water, living standards, and ecosystems?

Transit Oriented Development

In high-rise "Transit Oriented Development" urban spaces, it's easy to get nice homes with an on-ground density of 100 sq.meter per home. Let's take a city size of 300,000 people so that it can support a good education and healthcare infrastructure. Assuming 2.5 people/home that gives a population density of 40 sq.m/head and a city size of 12 sq.km. This can fit into a 2 km radius, quite friendly for walking or cycling and with very short in-city commutes. Inter-city transport would be supported by high-speed mass transit, railways, highways, and waterways where feasible. Airports can serve sets of cities, say at scales ranging from 4 to 40.

Can we house and feed the population with high living standards?

People will need food. There are 3.7 kCal per gram of cereal. A fit man needs 2,500 kCal per day. That's 0.68 kg/head/day. Per https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.YLD.CREL.KG, India produces 2,993 kg/hectare. There are 100 hectares per square kilometer. So India produces 299,300 kg/sq.km. That means 442,964 people can be fed per day per square km, or 1,214 people per year per square km. So a city of 300,000 people will need 247.2 square km of food-growing fields. Those fields can fit into a ring of 9.1 km radius -- an inner circle of 2 km radius for the city, with a ring of fields, 7.1 km wide, around the city. Farmers can live in the city and enjoy urban standards of living. Bye-bye rural distress. And those urban standards are comparable to Paris (France): 25,000 people/sq.km. in that inner city versus 20,000 for Paris. If you include the fields in the city area for density calculations, it's just 1,160 people/sq.km. Intercropping gets us vegetables and fruits. We haven't factored in any increase in farm productivity. and we've also not factored in the output of orchards, gardens, and plantations outside the city limits.

Will we have enough water?

Average annual rainfall is 300–650 millimetres in India. Let's take 300 mm for our city. We'll harvest water over the full 259.2 sq. km. (city and farmlands) to get a water budget of 77,759,525 cubic meters of water/year. That's 710 liters/person/day, (300,000 people, 1,000 liters/cubic meter, 365 days/year). That's a pretty nice water budget. And remember that water can be recycled, and we've not even talked of recycling that we would, of course, implement.

Will it scale?

Each city will be at least 18 km away from its nearest neighbor. With a transit speed of 120 km/hour, that distance is 9 minutes. A conurbation of 36 cities would comprise 10.8 million people, about the size of London, New York, or Seoul. That conurbation would be 154 km. from corner to corner (if those 36 cities are arranged in a 6 by 6 square). So the longest commute would be 77 minutes from corner to corner. Not too bad, and we haven't even explored any high-speed transit ideas, just plain decades-old transit technologies.

Is it feasible?

66% of the Indian population is rural, ref https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sp.rur.totl.zs, and about 400 million have not been born as yet. So we can build thousands of cities by upgrading existing villages as greenfield projects. Next, factor in satellite-city development near existing cities to handle their growth. We can get most of the way to the end state without even getting near the brownfield projects of existing-city revitalization. These revitalizations will encounter historical roots and cultures that we will need to consider, possibly as one-off designs that would preserve and enhance the deep urban cultures of the existing Indian cities.

A growing country with lovely cities, local food production, and re-wilding nature 

India's population is still increasing, and expected to flatten out at about 180 crores (1.8 billion). That's going to require 6 thousand such cities of 0.3 million people per city. India has a land area of about 3.3 million sq. km. The 6 thousand cities will use 72,000 sq. km. Compare that to the 222,688 sq.km. of current "urban land area" in India, ref https://tradingeconomics.com/india/urban-land-area-sq-km-wb-data.html). The ring of agriculture around each city will add up to another 1,483,191 sq. km. Compare that to 1,797,210 sq.km. at present, ref https://tradingeconomics.com/india/agricultural-land-percent-of-land-area-wb-data.html. So we can plant orchards, gardens, timber and other plantations in another 494,000 sq. km (15% of the land) and maintain the remaining 1,237 sq.km. (38%) as wild: for forests, grasslands, wetlands, and other natural landscapes that will restore our unbroken wildernesses for our ecosystems to thrive.

Dense cities, highly interconnected into super-cities: a recipe for economic growth. Each city surrounded by greenery, people eating sustainable local produce, an urbanized population with high quality of life. Lots of land set aside for wilderness. We can do it.

Make in India to remove the energy constraint on India’s development

To increase our level of development, India needs to increase its level energy use per capita. This requires a massive increase in energy supply. The energy constraint is about how to increase energy supply without causing environmental pollution and global warming.

How much energy do we need?

As per the IEA (http://www.iea.org/statistics/), the annual per-capita energy consumption for India and the USA is as follows:

Energy Consumption, Annual (IEA, 2014)	India	USA
Total Energy Consumption, MWh/capita	7.4	80.7
Electric Energy Consumption, MWh/capita	0.8	13.0

Electric energy is only 11% of the Indian consumption. What constitutes the rest of it?

1. Petroleum products (such as diesel, petrol, etc.) and natural gas
2. Wood, dung-cake, and agricultural waste used for fuel
3. Coal and lignite

We should set our development target in 2030 to be at the level of USA today. For this, we will need to scale up energy by 11 times. With the momentum we'll gain, we can build up from there. These are the proposed energy targets for India:

Energy Metric		2017	2030	2050
Total	Population (billions)	1.3	1.5	1.9
	Total Energy, TWh	9,676	121,068	306,706
	Oil & Gas, TWh	3,193	No fossil fuel	No fossil fuel
	Electric Power, TWh	1,040	118,068	303,706
	Coal and Lignite, TWh	2,443	No fossil fuel	No fossil fuel
	Bio-waste, TWh	3,000	3,000 biofuel	3,000 biofuel
Per capita	Total Energy, MWh	7.4	80.7	161.4
	Oil & Gas, MWh	2.5	-	-
	Bio-waste, MWh	2.3	2.0	1.6

We must also have these constraints on our energy supply plan:

1. Phase out fossil fuels (petroleum, natural gas, coal, and lignite) to avoid pollution
2. Produce carbon-neutral biofuels to replace the diesel, petrol, kerosene, ATF, CNG, LPG, etc. Bio-wastes (wood, dung-cake, and agricultural waste) are renewable and carbon-rich, and serve as the feedstock for biofuels. To avoid ecological disaster, we must keep the biofuels at current level of 3,000 TWh/year.
3. Use non-polluting energy sources (wind, solar, and nuclear) to fill the gap.

To meet this plan, we need to produce 121,068 TWh of energy by 2030, of which only 3,000 TWh is from bio-waste. Electric power generation must increase from 1,040 to 118,068 TWh, which is 114 times the current level.

Energy Metric		2017	2030	2050
Total	Total Energy, TWh	9,676	121,068	306,706
	Electric Power, TWh	1,040	118,068	303,706
	Bio-waste, TWh	3,000	3,000	3,000
Growth	Electric Power	Baseline	114	292
	Bio-waste	Baseline	1	1

This kind of 100x catch-up has happened earlier: our tele-density shot up from 5 million in 1991 to 700 million in 2012 and over 1 billion in 2016.

How much generating capacity will we need? At 90% plant load factor, we need 15,000 GW. How can we build it? Ref http://powermin.nic.in/en/content/power-sector-glance-all-india, we have 315 GW of generating capacity at present, with 43% of it in the private sector. We have a better base to scale up private sector in energy than we had for the telecom sector.

Installed Capacity	2017	2030
State Sector, GW	103	103
Central Sector, GW	77	77
Private Sector, GW	135	15,000
Total, GW	315	15,180

To ramp up electric power generation to 15,000 GW, these are the methods:

1. Solar: India’s solar potential is estimated at 750 GW
2. Wind: India’s potential could be higher than 1,000 GW
3. Nuclear: power can supply the balance of 13,250 GW.

The targets we currently pursue are sadly unambitious, even in the long-term. Ref http://niti.gov.in/writereaddata/files/document_publication/Energy_Efficiency.pdf, our NITI Aayog planners report only 762 TWh of energy use (probably just the electric power generated by State & Central plants), as against the 9,676 TWh estimated by the IEA. Then they intend to scale it to just 2,239 TWh in 2030, which is only 1.5 MWh/capita as compared to 7.4 MWh/capita of total energy consumption today and a developmental need for 11 times more than that. This plan will keep us firmly in the undeveloped and energy-poor category even in 2047.

The same lack of imagination and planning is what we see when we bemoan the bankrupt and money-losing Discoms. When we plan for 100x growth, these will become a remnant of a past era like the BSNL of telecom, instead of a dead weight crushing all attempts at scaling. 

Make in India

 

We need to set ourselves the challenge of establishing a power-plant industry that would power India up to any desired standard. The industry size will be huge: at $1.5 million per MW, it will be US$22.5 trillion of capex for 15,000 GW. We can afford it in the same way as we afforded the mobile telecom investments: funded by the people who pay for improved infrastructure because they see it improving their own lives and productivity.

We can make it transformative by “Make in India”, to create the manufacturing entities that will build the power plants for use in India and abroad. China already dominates the solar photovoltaic supply chain. The wind turbine space is hotly contested, but not by Indian companies. Scalable biofuel and nuclear plant technology is in startup stage, and can be a “Make in India” success story if we choose.

What will it take?

1. Incubate and pilot world-class biofuel and nuclear plant technology in India
2. Deploy and use the technology in India, with facilitative regulatory approach
3. Build a track record of cheap and safe operations that will enable scaling globally.

What do you think? Please leave a comment.