Selling Tomorrows

"It's Beating" - Morley Safer Sees a Regrown Heart Valve and Points to BOTH Frankenstein and Pixies

Last night 60 Minutes aired a segment on how researchers are growing human body parts -- ears, kidneys, lungs -- to be used as replacements for veterans and people who have diseases that require amputation.  It was a great example of how certain thousands-of-years-old themes are still with us.  

At one point, Morley Safer asks, "Are you suggesting a remarkable future of when organs fail we simply replace them and live to 120, 150?" [Translation: are we talking the holy grail of immortality?] To which the researcher responds, "The hope for the future is that if you do have a patient who has organ failure, you don't want the patient to die because you're waiting for an organ. People are dying every day on the transplant wait lists." [Translation: Of course, but you won't catch me talking about that. Let's focus on how we're saving lives right now.] Later, Safer says "It's enough to make doctor Frankenstein jealous," and compares the science to "pastry making," "pixie dust" and "magical," all of which reveal our intense desire and fear of scientific advancement.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Selling Low Probability, High Impact Events

Tom Friedman has an excellent column today comparing the application of Dick Cheney's "One Percent" Doctrine on terrorism to climate change.  As Friedman explains, the question is what to do about potential events that are unlikely to happen, but if they do the fallout would be catastrophic.

With that in mind, he counters about the downside if we're wrong on climate change:

"If we prepare for climate change by building a clean-power economy, but climate change turns out to be a hoax, what would be the result? Well, during a transition period, we would have higher energy prices. But gradually we would be driving battery-powered electric cars and powering more and more of our homes and factories with wind, solar, nuclear and second-generation biofuels. We would be much less dependent on oil dictators who have drawn a bull's-eye on our backs; our trade deficit would improve; the dollar would strengthen; and the air we breathe would be cleaner. In short, as a country, we would be stronger, more innovative and more energy independent."

This is an interesting avenue of tomorrow-ism to explore. Anyone have other examples of low probability, high impact events that have been successfully sold to the public?  (Meritorious or not?)

How to Launch a Tweetup: Lessons from NASA

If it wasn't clear from my exuberant coverage a couple weeks ago, NASA PR completely rocked the tweetup of STS-129. Here's an excerpt from a piece I had published today in Bulldog Reporter on what NASA did right -- that any company can learn from and copy.  A white paper with the 35 things that NASA did right is coming out shortly.  Leave a comment or shoot me an email if you'd like to be on the mailing list for it.

If any of my #NASAtweetup tweeps are reading this, I'd love your input below on what YOU thought NASA did right in cultivating a community online.

"You may not have a spaceship, but your company has a fan base. Maybe they're customers who have relied on your product for decades and feel it belongs more to them than to you. Maybe they're engineers who appreciate how hard it is to create new kinds of paint—or improve the flavor of Tastykakes. Maybe they're investors fascinated with the countries where your company does business. They won't think of themselves as fans until they're in a room with like-minded people. They won't think of themselves as members of a community until you bring them together. And you can't be accepted as a part of that community—reaping all the sales, visibility, credibility and even free labor—until you get tweeting."

Read the full article here.

Flight from the City: "What the #%&@! is Wrong with our Economy?

You have to hand it to Borsodi. He looks at the economic devastation around him in 1933, people walking around shell shocked and penniless, and outright rejects it.  Where everyone sees a savage business cycle, he sees a savage economic model.  Where others queue for breadlines, he buys farmland to grow his own food.  Absolutists are easy to admire, of course, but unlike most of them, Borsodi doesn't substitute ideology for logic.  He embraces the scientific model and applies it over and over until he finds a way out of his mess.

Borsodi makes three arguments in the book. The first is that an economic system that can't eliminate unemployment is immoral and impractical.  Snip:

..."all these victims of unemployment are alike in this respect, that they are periodically unable to support themselves and their families through no fault of their own because of their dependence upon what they earn as a cog in some part of the complex machinery of our factory-dominated civilization."

 

What Would You do if Unemployment Hit 30%? A Three-Part Look at 1932's "Flight from the City"

You know you're living in interesting times when Ron Paul's amendment to audit the Federal Reserve gets passed out of committee 43-26.  But then again, 10% unemployment has prodded a lot of people to start questioning some fundamentals.

When unemployment hit 31.2% in 1932, an economist named Ralph Borsodi wrote one of the most important utopic works of the 20th century, "Flight from the City."  And he didn't just write "Flight" -- he lived it.  Ralph looked at the depression around him and decided to pack up the family, buy a farm, and make his own economic way in the world. And it mostly works.  He's not a socialist, though he finds a lot of flaws with capitalism. And he's not a "return to the earth" kind of person, noting many times he hates backbreaking labor and finds many ways to have machines do the work for him.

Like most utopias, "flight" says more about the times in which it was written than those that came to pass.  And yet it's worth reading because the eerie similarities to today reveal how darned constant and consistent our utopic hopes are. Hopes that go back for thousands of years.  Understanding the intricacies of this dynamic is the key to laying out a CONVINCING vision of tomorrow.

Plus, it's just really fun to read.

This week kicks off a special 3-post look at "Flight." I hope you enjoy.

New Must-See for Future Fans: PopSci's "This Week in the Future"

Each week, Popular Science is summarizing its news about the future by creating images that mash up their latest stories.  The art is really something (sorry, they haven't enabled image sharing features, so you'll have to go to the site to see), and it's worth checking out.