However, after the last ice age ended approx. 11,500 years ago, we invented farming. Then came the industrial society a couple of hundred years ago. Then trains, automobiles, and aircraft. The chemical industry. Electricity.

It goes faster and faster, and while it took 120 years from the time the first railroad was invented until it was within practical reach of 80% of the population in the U.S., it only took 100 years for the telephone and 70 years for the radio. Then came television, which reached 80% of the population after 60 years.

Human knowledge and innovation is growing exponentially for the following reasons:

• The number of people in tertiary education doubles every 15 years
• The continued development and spread of meta-ideas (ideas about how to spread ideas, such as postal service, TV, patent law, venture capital or the Internet)
• The average human IQ grows approx. 0.3% per annum.

Our creation of new knowledge is feeding on itself, and some technologies such as computing clock speeds, computing cost cuts, integrated circuit density and performance, unit sales of microprocessors, supercomputer power, DNA sequencing cost reductions, size of mapped gene bank, price reduction per bit of random access memory, wireless price/performance, number of Internet hosts, Internet backbone bandwidth, resolution of 3D brain scans, etc. are doubling at astounding rates – typically every 12 to 24 months. Other technologies and sciences are progressing more slowly, of course, but overall it seems that our knowledge doubles approx once every 8 or 9 years, which means that it may be 40-50 times in 2050 as it is today. And this means that before then we shall see a range of new technologies that today may seem too farfetched to be possible at all. But then again, before we invented the car, the airplane, the contact lenses, the PC, the satellite TV, the car exhaust catalyser, the plasma screen, the iPod, the smartphone or the microwave oven, who but the most imaginative futurists would have imagined them to be possible?

Humans are now working on five technologies that each have the potential to radically improve the prospects for our environment. One can completely reprocess the content of old landfills and ensure that we will never need to make new ones. Another can enhance productivity in farming so much that we can actually reduce the farmland area even as our population grows and gets better fed. A third one can reverse extinction, a fourth one provide clean fuel forever, and the fifth one give us access to clean power for millions of years. These technologies are in different stages of development, but if history is any guide they make take longer to complete and/or commercialize than people initially estimate – but eventually their use and impact may radically exceed what we can imagine today.

Emerging technology # 1: Plasma Arc Waste Disposal

As the world gets ever richer, we will pile up more and more garbage until we get a scenario as in the movie Wall.E.

Or will we? A new radical technology for treatment of garbage is called Plasma Arc Waste Disposal. Mixed garbage is here sent into a vacuum chamber, where it is heated to approx. 4.000-14.000 degrees centigrade. As there is virtually no oxygen present in the process, the extreme temperatures don’t make the trash burn, but instead it rips molecules apart and leaves free atoms. Many of these are hydrogen and carbon, which are funnelled off and recombined to syngas. Some of this gas can be used to drive the plant, but there is an excess, which can, for instance, be used for heating of thousands of houses.

The parts of the trash that doesn’t turn into syngas come out as floating slag, which has a volume that is typically less than 1% of the original garbage. It is now possible to separate metals out from this slag, so that this can be recycled. The rest can be used for creating rockwool or construction material, but if it is simply cooled down, what is left is essentially a form of stones.

Such plants have already been constructed in many countries, and in several cases next to existing landfills, where the accumulated garbage from several generations will be entirely reprocessed so that the end results essentially be energy, stones and recycled metal.

Emerging technology # 2: Seed chipping machines

It can be argued that the largest part of the damage man has done to plants and animals through times, has been through the reduction of natural habitat areas due mainly to our increased farming. As global population is expected to continue to expand for at least several more decades, and as we hope to feed people better in developing countries, one wonders if we will need even more of natures’ land for farming purposes.

Not necessarily. One of the new, radical technologies that can enhance our use of existing farmland is Monsanto’s so-called seed chipping machines. Monsanto is one of the world’s leading producers of gene-modified crop seeds, which may require less water fertilizer or pesticides, or which may grow faster and be more healthy. Monsanto has traditionally relied of a fairly cumbersome process to identify the best plants from a years’ harvest; essentially growing them in growth houses, selecting the best performing, taking DNA samples from their leaves, and then choose which ones should form the basis for future generations.

However, Monsanto’s new technology enable them to take a DNA sample from single seeds at a speed of one seed per second, without disabling the seed from growing into a plant afterwards. Each seed and DNA sample is then bar-coded so that they can be matched later on. Using this technique, the company is already doing millions of DNA tests annually, and it can now offer its clients the ability to buy seeds based on precise knowledge of their DNA and thus how they will perform under various conditions.

Previously Monsanto would typically be able to increase the yield of corn farms by approx. 1 % per year, but given this new technology they now expect productivity increases to rise to approx. 3.5% annually. This means a doubling in just 20 years, or far more than the growth in our demand for farm products. So yes, we might actually be able to give farm land back to nature while at the same time feeding an increasing population better. And that may very well mean that global forest cover by year 2050 is perhaps 10% bigger than it is today.

Emerging technology # 3: Recreation of extinct species

It can surely be argued that the biggest environmental problem in the World by far is extinction of species. After all, “extinction is forever”, as they say. Even though the global loss of habitat may be slightly reversed over the coming decades, this will not bring a single species back, and it seems likely that we will lose approx. 0.4% of our bird and mammal species and around 0.1% of other species until 2050. We should evidently do our best to minimize that loss (most effective way is protect existing rain forests), but to some this problem might raise the ultimate out-of-the-box question: ”Is there any way that we could actually reverse extinction – recreate extinct species?”

Actually they did exactly that in the movie Jurassic Park from 1974, of course, but when scientists were asked at the time if something similar could ever be done in reality, they would typically rule it out, even though the principle of how it was done in the movie made some sense.

That was then.

This is now. Scientist have recently recreated the Spanish Flu virus and created a bacteria based on an entirely synthesized genome (although using an existing, living bacteria as basis). Some of them are now reasonably confident that they can recreate extinct species. The first large scale program in this respect is reverse engineering of the mammoth. Over the years we have found a number of relatively well preserved mammoths in the ice in Siberia, and it has turned out that some have fairly well preserved DNA in their hair. So by analyzing many of these samples and comparing them we are now close to knowing the actually sequence, which is 98.55 to 99.4 % identical with the DNA of the African elephant. So the plan is to modify DNA of an elephant embryo so that it becomes like a mammoth and then let an elephant breed it.

Can we recreate the T-Rex? That seems very unlikely, since we probably never will find enough preserved DNA to figure out the sequence, and since we wouldnt have another species resembling it enough to form the basis for breeding. However, it now seems reasonably plausible that we can recreate some or many of the species that have been - or will be - lost in modern times. So the expression “extinction is forever” may go extinct.

Emerging technology # 4: 3rd and 4th generation bio fuel

A number of companies are now working on creating modified microorganisms that can effectively capture CO2 and excrete oil – typically algae. This is done by manipulating their genes so that they produce exactly the fuels that can be used for different kinds of engines, from jet engines to diesel and normal car engines, for instance. An important part of the task may also be to speed up their metabolism or to time a shift from focus on growing to focus on producing oil for maximum output. These technologies will be CO2 neutral, and the output per land area unit will be perhaps be 300 times as large as with current biofuel. Since the microorganisms will absorb CO2, it may make sense to put some of the plants close to coal power plants, so that the CO2 from the exhaust can be fed to the microorganisms.

These technologies will initially be very far from economically competitive, but that may be remedied over time.

Emerging technology # 5: Fusion power

If information technology and atomic manipulation is the ultimate answer the energy challenge, the ultimate prize would be nuclear fusion. One reason to think that we will get this one day is that there is a tendency within technology that everything which is desirable and which can be done in principle, will sooner or later get done on reality. Nuclear fusion works in principle on Earth and in praxis in the sun and other stars and is hugely desirable. However, so far, this has turned out be the biggest engineering challenge of all times, and one of the most expensive ones too, which is why there is a saying that “nuclear fusion is 40 years away, and it always will be”.

Having said that, clear progress is actually being made in the various experimental plants such as National Ignition Facility in California, and this year Jeff Bezoz of Amazon.com and other invested in the company General Fusion, which hopes to be able to demonstrate working nuclear fusion within just a few years.

If indeed we can make nuclear fusion work in industrial scale, it will arguable change the world like few other technologies ever has. In understanding its importance, think the use of fire or the internal combustion machine. Why? Because nuclear fusion will be very clean, perhaps cleaner than any other energy technology including gas, windmills and solar panels, and with it, we will have resources to power the Earth for 150 billion years – 10 times as long as the universe has existed. The implications for our economy, environment and global politics will be massive.