Brian Gongol
The Brian Gongol Show can be heard on WHO Radio in Des Moines, Iowa on 1040 AM (the signal reaches much of North America at night) or streaming online at WHORadio.com. The show airs from 9:00 pm to 10:00 pm Central Time on Sunday nights. Podcasts of show highlights are updated most weekdays.
Tonight was a good night to dive into the Future Scale again, if only because we've been bombarded ad nauseam about the economy of late, and there's just not a lot of new thinking coming into the discussion right now.
Here are some highlights of our discussion:
- China is planning to build a prototype vertical farm by 2015. That tells us a number of things about the overlapping changes in the environment, energy prices, food prices, and urbanization. These are global-scale changes, but it should be no surprise that China is taking action, since those changes are happening on a big scale there.
- By 2030, reliable Internet access should reach half of the world. That almost seems like too pessimistic a forecast, but in reality, much of the world still doesn't even have reliable telephone service. Even here in the US, Internet users number only 223 million of our total of 305 million people.
- Texas alone could have 50 million people by 2040. Compare that to Iowa's mere 3 million today, which only slowly grew from 2.2 million in 1900.
Keywords in this show:
agriculture •
China •
economics •
food prices •
future •
futurism •
Internet access •
Iowa •
telephones •
Texas •
urbanization •
vertical farms