“Now that we can do anything, what will we do?”

Happy new year and welcome to Massive Change Weekly, an electronic newsletter sharing news about groundbreaking achievements in global design.

Here is a small list of five nominees for 2005’s Massive Changers:

1. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We’d like to be more original than Time Magazine, who named Bill and Melinda Gates, along with Bono, the Persons of the Year, but we can’t dispute how extraordinary the efforts of the Foundation are. We love the clarity of their mission and their uncompromising commitment to achieving measurable results. The Foundation is committed to promoting equity in four areas: global health, education, public libraries, and support for at-risk-families in Washington State and the greater Portland area. The Foundation joins local, national and international partners to ensure that advances in these areas reach those who need them most. The Foundation has said that its commitment to equity means that it focuses on disease in the developing world, and education in the developed world.

The Foundation has an endowment of approximately $30 billion dollars and has awarded grants totaling almost $10 billion to date. The largest grant has thus far gone to the Gates Millenium Scholars Program, United Negro College Fund. The most well known of the Foundation’s activities is probably their commitment to vaccine initiatives including the Vaccine Fund and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative ( http://www.iavi.org/ ). The Foundation’s focus in this area has been on eradicating polio, malaria, AIDS and TB in the developing world, supporting the efforts of NGOs and other significant initiatives.

2. Local Hero: The McLaughlin-Rotman Global Health Network ( http://www.mcmm.ca/news/kain.html ) is a Toronto initiative committed to understanding the roots of malaria and TB and eradicating the diseases. in 2005, Scientist Dr. Kevin Kain (co-investigator) in collaboration with Phillipe Gros (principal investigator) of McGill University, have been awarded a $1.92M (2004-2007) Canadian Genetic Diseases Network Large Scale Collaborative Research Projects grant to study the genetic determinants of resistance/susceptibility to malaria and tuberculosis.

Malaria and tuberculosis continue to be serious global health problems. The World Health Organization estimates that yearly 300-500 million cases of malaria occur and more than 1 million people die of malaria. Tuberculosis (TB) kills about 2 million people each year, making it one of the world’s leading infectious causes of death among young people and adults. Astonishingly, one-third of the world’s population is infected with TB. (more…)

“Now that we can do anything, what will we do?”

Welcome to Massive Change Weekly, an electronic newsletter sharing news about groundbreaking achievements in global design.

We will build a global mind.

Since we launched Massive Change, a number of projects have either come to the fore, or have made significant developments, reinforcing our belief that humanity is “building a global mind.” Though some critics, like Robert Fulford, interpreted the declaration that information technology “will help make us all think the same way,” the evidence presented supports Fulford’s own understanding of “information technology as the agent of diversity and originality”. It’s a promise, not a threat.

In Massive Change we argued:

“The most profound impact of information technology has been to transfer the potential of the scientific method - the ever-expanding accumulation of knowledge - to the cultural sphere. Internet protocols allowed us to link any two computers, enabling an explosive global network of networks. Emerging grid protocols for distributed computing allow us to link everything else - databases, simulation and visualization tools, and the unused computing power of machines - generating a worldwide cultural accumulation beyond imagination, available to anyone, anywhere.”

Here are some incredible projects in that spirit:

The Internet Archive
The Internet Archive ( http://www.archive.org/ ) was founded in 1996. According to their website: “Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their culture and heritage. Without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form. The Archive’s mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars. The Archive collaborates with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian.” The Internet Archive maintains a variety of multimedia resources. This includes archived copies of web pages, taken at different points in time - through the Wayback Machine - but now also includes software, films, books, and audio recordings. The Wayback Machine contains well over a petabyte of data (a quadrillion bytes) and was is growing at a rate of at least 30 terabytes per month. The archive is free to use. (more…)

Welcome to Massive Change Weekly, an electronic newsletter sharing news about groundbreaking achievements in global design.

LifeStraw Could Revolutionize Global Health

Access to clean water is one of the world’s most serious health problems, if not the most serious. For about $5, the revolutionary new LifeStraw ( http://www.lifestraw.com ) could go a long way to alleviating the situation. This 3.4 ounce plastic tube has a filter that can eliminate bacteria and viruses that cause diarrhoel diseases, including typhoid, cholera, e-coli, and salmonella. Two layers of textile filter hard dirt, and iodine resin kills 99.3% of the bacteria and viruses, and carbon catches everything else.

The device was developed by an extraordinary Danish company, Verstergaard Frandsen ( http://www.vestergaard-frandsen.com ), who specialize in “disease control textiles”, having previously produced the PermaNet, a mosquito bed net, and ZeroFly, an emergency shelter material that also helps prevent malaria.

Each LifeStraw will last for a year. It was designed to include no moving parts and no electricity, and hence virtually no maintenance. (more…)

“Now that we can do anything, what will we do?”

Welcome to Massive Change Weekly, an electronic newsletter sharing news about groundbreaking achievements in global design.

One of the most important “design economies” that the Massive Change project explores is energy. Massive Change declares that “we will bring energy to the entire world.”

We continue to design massive hydroelectric and petroleum projects with regional and even global economic, social, and environmental impact, building machines on a scale the world has never seen. At the same time, initiatives for sustainable energy wind, geothermal, and especially solar promise to fundamentally restructure the energy system itself, from a centrally based system to a distributed network of energy production and consumption.

The big projects: In the realm of energy, we are seeking out small, portable options for our decentralized future. Meanwhile, we persist in designing feats of wonder that will fundamentally reconstruct the natural world.

Clean green power: Initiatives for sustainable energy promise to fundamentally restructure the energy industry itself. To stay in the game, the oil industry is evolving away from fossil fuels, towards renewables. The most massive change will happen here.

In the 1960s, the late geophysicist Dr. M. King Hubbert famously foretold the end of American oil production. Based on his research, he came to the conclusion that oil production would peak within a year or two of 1970. He was widely abused for this notion. But it turns out, in fact, that he was right. Current projections indicate that global oil production, too, ought to peak well before our population stabilizes somewhere around mid-twenty-first century, with fertility rates dropping as they are. Natural gas and nuclear are the current forerunners to replace oil. But, in close analysis, neither proves adequate. Natural gas will not be able to meet the world’s energy demand much beyond 2020, and a future of nuclear breeder reactors isn’t exactly an attractive scenario. So major players like Shell, British Petroleum, and Stuart Energy have been working toward alternatives to oil: wind, solar, and hydrogen fuel by way of water electrolysis. (more…)