SpaceX

1. Interplanetary Transport System (ITS)

SpaceX

SpaceX

2. The BFR (Don’t Ask)

SpaceX

3. The Timeline

The Washington Post via Getty Images

SpaceX

4. Cost

SpaceX

SpaceX

5. Earth

Over the past year, cities across the world have been buffeted by natural events. Floods ravaged the residents of Mumbai; and tropical storm Harvey left Houston underwater. Cape Town had its worst drought in over a century; and Shanghai, the world’s most populous city, experienced its hottest day in recorded history.

While we can’t say that these individual events were caused by climate change, they are likely to have been exacerbated by it. And scientific models predict that these kind of extreme weather events will become more common, and more intense, in the future.

Cities and their inhabitants will be increasingly vulnerable. Throughout human history, we have built our major settlements on low-lying land near rivers and seas. As these cities have grown, more people have packed into areas at risk of inundation. We’ve constructed our cities with tarmac, concrete and glass that reflect heat when it’s sunny and collect, channel and speed up the water when it rains. And many cities find themselves at the end of long supply chains bringing them water, energy, and food. For these cities, climate change will pose severe and increasing risks.

City administrations are, of course, beginning to respond to these challenges. The C40 network of mega-cities is collaborating to cut carbon emissions. The Rockefeller 100 Resilient Cities initiative is helping administrations prepare for the impacts of a changing climate. Cities are using their power to advocate for action, and – as we have seen in Trump’s America — stepping-up when their national governments waver.

However, the stark reality is that, despite all the excellent initiatives that cities are taking to cut emissions, the CO2 humankind has already pumped into the atmosphere means the world is destined to suffer severe climate impacts. Cities will have to adapt.

Green infrastructure is an area where I think city governments should show more leadership and put more investment. This could be at the macro level across the whole city, or on the micro-level in individual dwellings. Done well, green infrastructure can provide multiple environmental and social benefits.

As we have seen in 2017, flooding is already a major global challenge. And here in the UK, according to the Environment Agency, floods are now the number one natural hazard facing the country. With climate change leading to rising sea levels, changing rainfall patterns, and severe storms, the threat is only going to get worse.

The rising tides cannot simply be held back with concrete and barriers; water needs to flow somewhere. The aim should be to slow it down, allow it to soak away, and give it somewhere to go. Cities should be designed to be more like a sponge than a table-top.

Green infrastructure can help. Green roofs slow water down. Front gardens allow it to soak away. New parks and playing fields can provide civic amenity for most of the year – and a harmless place for water during floods.

Green infrastructure can also help with overheating cities. Due to the ‘urban heat island’ effect, big cities are often more than 5 degrees warmer than the surrounding areas. Given that the world is only going to get warmer, residents in big metropolises will feel the heat. Trees provide shade and help cool the environment, as well as improving amenity and liveability. Having been hit by savage heat-waves over recent years Melbourne is working to double its tree canopy cover.

Green infrastructure also supports biodiversity, which will come under strain from a changing climate. A good example is the ‘Wild West End’ scheme in London, which, by providing new small habitats on roofs and parklets, and creating corridors between existing big habitats like the parks, is encouraging birds, bees and bats back into the centre of the capital.

Some of these green spaces might even support urban agriculture. Climate change is bound to affect farming and food security across the world. And city dwellers rely on imported food. I’m always struck by the fact that 90% of the Russian potato crop is grown in dacha gardens or small farms, because people think it is too important to rely on someone else for this staple.

Here in the UK, one of my favourite pieces of urban green infrastructure is the front garden. This small patch of green can do lots of good things: slow down rainwater and allow it to soak away; help cool the city; provide a habitat for biodiversity; reduce pollution and even be a place to grow some veg. Oh, and front gardens makes neighbourhoods more attractive places to live.

Yet across the UK, in an act of civic vandalism, these gardens are being dug up and concreted over to provide parking spaces. This is the opposite of what our cities need to be sustainable.

Despite the important role green infrastructure can play in making cities more resilient and more verdant and attractive, it too often gets ignored. Politicians don’t give it the same political attention as roads and buildings. City administrators don’t give it a senior boss or a budget. Engineers prefer to construct hard surfaces and to pour concrete. And citizens don’t believe that their millions of small steps will add up to anything big enough. This has to change. And that requires civic leadership.

Peter Madden, OBE

Here’s a fun game: what is it that links Facebook’s ‘Like’ button, the most downloaded taxi app in the world and the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham?
 
The answer, you may be surprised to learn, is hackathons.
 
For the uninitiated, a hackathon is when a group of people come together to identify problems and find solutions to them using the wonders of technology, typically over a couple of days. When Facebook wanted to improve people’s engagement with each other, they held a hackathon and ended up creating their famous ‘thumbs up’. When one man had to wait an hour and half in the rain for a cab in Rio de Janeiro, he and his colleagues came together to try and solve the inefficiencies of local public transport. Easy Taxi was born.
 
So, what does all this mean for Barking and Dagenham?
 
Our borough typifies London: its celebrated past, its vibrant present, its relentless optimism about the future. It was once the home of England’s 1966 World Cup-winning manager Sir Alf Ramsey and its captain Bobby Moore. It was the scene of the Sewing Machine Strikes, immortalised in the hit film ‘Made in Dagenham’ for their part in the battle for equal pay in the workplace. During the 2012 Olympics, arguably London’s finest moment of recent decades, we were a host borough.
 
This is an area with an exciting future. Huge regeneration is planned, including new transport links and housing. People want to be here, and when they come, they want to stay: we were recently crowned England’s property renovation hotspot. Like so much of London, Barking and Dagenham has changed and continues to change at a rapid pace. The borough is more diverse than it has ever been and we celebrated that recently through our Summer of Festivals. But while this is all testament to the success of our area, it also poses challenges. The question for us all is how do we ensure that everyone in Barking and Dagenham – no matter what background or faith you come from – has a stake and a say in our community.
 
It’s that question that has led to Barking and Dagenham teaming up this weekend with local technology company DigiLab to host the UK’s first ever social-cohesion hackathon. By bringing together tech experts and service designers with local people of all ages and backgrounds, we will respond to and tackle the issues and concerns of residents. 
 
By the end of the weekend we will start to develop practical ways to improve the way services work for our communities, find solutions to challenge perceptions of public safety, bring different generations of people together across the borough, or help to encourage the reporting of hate crime. The only limits to what we can achieve are our imaginations, and what matters most is that it is local people who will decide.
 
In modern Britain, with the technology and the talent available to us, this should be the norm, not a one-off: bringing people together and empowering them to build the society they want to see.
 
This is an exciting opportunity for us. If you’re in the local area, sign up and come along. If you’re a service designer or tech expert wanting to create meaningful solutions to everyday problems get in touch. If you’re not, we will be updating on our progress during and after the weekend, so take a look at our social media pages to find out more. Oh, and while you are there, don’t forget to hit the ‘Like’ button.
 
Councillor Darren Rodwell is leader of Barking and Dagenham Council

Credit: Wareable

For the past few weeks I’ve been wearing the new Apple Watch Series 3 on my left wrist and the Fitbit Ionic, the company’s first ever smartwatch, on my right.

The experience of using both at the same time has been interesting to say the least. On the one hand (well, wrist), there’s Apple’s third generation Watch, which has come on leaps and bounds since the first one and is finally starting to provide a more compelling argument that iPhone owners need one in their lives.

Notifications have been a smartphone staple for what seems like forever and above anything else, this is what I’ve found myself tapping into most on the Watch Series 3. A glance at my wrist on a packed tube carriage or running on a treadmill in the gym. I don’t tend to deal or respond to these notifications a lot of the time, but it’s nice just to be aware of what’s happening at work or knowing there’s a WhatsApp group conversation I need to be part of. I know, a smartphone does this already, but normally when I grab my phone it means spending time checking in on Twitter, Instagram and a bunch of other apps. Basically, more screen time.

Apple’s third smartwatch does a pretty credible impression of a sports watch too. It’ll track my swims and runs and not leaving me waiting achingly long for a GPS signal to lock on. There’s also something quite addictive about closing those Activity rings before my other Apple Watch owning friends. Until battery life gets significantly better though, I’m not sure it’ll ever replace a dedicated sports watch, but for most, it does tick the boxes.

The big new addition of course is LTE, which has been available on smartwatches before, but means I can leave my iPhone behind and get a smartphone-like experience on my watch. Taking and making calls from my wrist or asking Siri about appointments in my calendar in public is just something I’m never going to get used to. But the notification support or the ability to stream music (which isn’t available just yet) without having to remember to transfer new music over to the watch iTunes could persuade me to spend a little more for the luxury. Ultimately, though I still want my smartphone by my side. What happens when you want to grab a quick snap of something? A smartwatch just isn’t cut out for that.

Then there’s the Ionic, the only other smartwatch that has been talked about as much as Apple’s. Fitbit has taken its fitness tracker DNA and put it inside of a design that is best described as Marmite. Some will love it, some will hate it. Unsurprisingly, fitness tracking is where the Ionic impresses most, but it does a decent job as a smartwatch too. Notification support is more basic than Apple’s approach, but features like Fitbit Pay contactless payments work effortlessly and while there aren’t too many standalone apps right now, the few that are there, work well.

Fitbit’s CEO James Park gave his reasons why the company didn’t include LTE in its first smartwatch, and I’m inclined to agree with what he had to say on the feature for now. But there’s a sense of inevitability that it will be on the Fitbit agenda further down the line. One of those reasons will no doubt have been battery life, one of the biggest differentiators between Apple and Fitbit’s smartwatches and the reason the Ionic spends more time on my wrist. It just lasts longer (four days to Apple’s day and a half) even with a super bright display and that’s something Apple is going to have to seek to improve. Because if it does, then Fitbit will seriously have to raise its game.

The real litmus test for any piece of technology is whether it has the ability to stick around and when I mean stick around, I mean you are still using it for more than a few weeks after you first pull it out of the box. In the case of the Watch Series 3 and the Ionic, they will be sticking around. At least they will be for me. I’ve not really been able to say that about a lot of smartwatches before, but both Apple and Fitbit have gone some way to prove that smartwatches do have a future at a time when many still doubt it. Couple that with Google’s more fashion focused approach to Android Wear through partnerships with the Fossil Group and Movado, or Garmin’s ability to blend proper sports tracking with watch smarts, and it finally feels like smartwatches are going in the right direction.

Now there are strong options to choose from, options that offer different answers to what a smartwatch should be and what they should do. It finally feels like the benefits of owning one are starting to be realised and if the news that Apple is now the number one watchmaker in the world tells us anything, it’s that it’s time to accept that smartwatches aren’t going anywhere.

Cyber-security threats. Ransomware attacks. Software malfunctions. These terms used to be reserved for the most advanced sci-fi films and IT professionals. In a case of life imitating art, these terms have now entered the everyday lexicon and have a real-world impact, outside of the IT department. The recent WannaCry ransomware attack crippled the UK’s NHS’ IT systems, causing appointments to be cancelled and operations to be postponed. Similarly, we saw British Airways fall foul to a software outage which grounded every commercial flight from Gatwick and Heathrow for 24 hours, obviously ruining or, at least delaying, thousands of passenger’s holiday and travel plans. We are used to seeing doomsday cyber scenarios play out in movies, but as our lives become ever more affected by those who wish to cause cyber chaos, can we truly trust technology in this day and age?

The invisible threat

Technology is truly integrated into every aspect of our life. We use technology to work, to relax, for entertainment, to communicate, to plan our schedule, and now some can even use it to do laundry. It stands to reason that the more we rely on technology, the more we need to trust that it will just simply work. But cyber security threats and software issues have the potential to negatively impact the way we live and, in many cases, has made us sceptical when it comes to adopting new technologies. Why would we trust gadgets and services such as AI and self-driving cars that we have seen cause hypothetical worldwide chaos time and time again on the big screen, when simple software faults can ground planes and destroy our health service in real life? Our recent study looked into our perception of emerging technology and it makes for grim reading if you are a technology company. Almost 80 per cent of UK adults looking to buy AI products in the future may reconsider due to the threat of hackers targeting technology. And nearly half (48 per cent) of us claim that we would not purchase AI devices at all due to the threat of cyber-attacks. The revelations regarding 1984-esque Orwellian hacking tools developed and used by the CIA and British intelligence to spy on household connected devices is just one reason why we as consumers are concerned about emerging technology.

The reality of the situation is that society is not yet comfortable with embracing the technology we have watched destroy or take over the world in films time after time. But it is now becoming increasingly obvious that our negative perception is standing in the way of the potential for positive digital transformation and is an issue technology companies must address, if we are to embrace emerging technology.

Who is the master?

Home robots have been designed to help us and eliminate household chores, who would be against that? The problem is that we have seen these devices regularly depicted negatively on-screen. For instance, the AI robotic creation, Ultron, featured in Marvel’s latest Avengers superhero flick was designed with the intention of helping humanity, but inevitably acts in a destructive way that was not intended. In this world, Thor, Iron Man and Captain America were on hand to neutralise the cold hearted robotic threat, but outside the Marvel cinematic universe, the real world does not have a super-powered villain deterrent. Indeed, our study also revealed that less than a quarter (24 per cent) of us believe home robots are safe with over half (52 per cent) concerned they could also fall victim to cyber criminals with malicious intentions. It is, therefore, more important than ever for companies producing home robots to prove these devices are not a menace to society, but are designed to help make our lives easier.

But there is hope! Companies such as Tesla, Apple and Microsoft are pouring a huge amount of time, energy and talent in to developing innovative AI technology, all of which proves that companies are taking our concerns seriously.

It is up to manufacturers of such technology to prove to us that doomsday predictions made in films are works of fiction and nothing more. It is crucial that they place a high importance on prioritising quality to protect the population thus gaining our confidence in regards to emerging technologies. Quality must be integral and prioritised from the initial concept of a new tech product right through to when the device hits the shelf.

Ultimately, if innovations such as AI, autonomous vehicles and smart homes are to become part of our everyday life, government and businesses have a duty to prove to every one of us that stringent precautions have been taken to safeguard and protect human life. Quality is non-negotiable and by proving this is at the core of innovation, businesses will begin to change our current perception of advanced technology.