Top of the leader board today is bfudragon48 with an amassed fantasy fortune of $17,620,444.11

Play the disaster simulation game from the UN/ISDR

“Your role in this game is to plan and construct a safer environment for your population. You must assess the disaster risk and try to limit the damage when natural hazards strike. Expect advice along the way, both good and bad”.

Image: Flood result, source: UN/ISDR

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6425927.stm

The Utopia Experiment, conducted by Dr Dylan Evans, a senior lecturer in Intelligent Autonomous Systems, is an attempt to answer these questions. Over the next 18 months he will be building a self-sufficient community near the village of Culbokie on the Black Isle just north of Inverness, Scotland. Volunteers of all ages and from all walks of life are invited to stay here for up to 3 months, pretending they are living at the dawn of the 21st century.

Lets take a couple of the key ways we describe politics and the wider world. Firstly, people all over the world use the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’. These originated in the French Revolution and have had a clear association over the last two centuries, socialism and Marxism on one side, the forces of conservatism on the other. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Soviet Bloc, and the rise of green politics, it is not clear that left and right have any real meaning or future ahead of them.

The geographies of our planet have associations with who we are and where we belong. We talk of ‘the West’ all the time to mean countries like the UK. This is meant to denote a set of shared ideas democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and freedom of expression. However, ‘the West’ was defined in opposition to the threat of ‘the East’ and ‘the red peril’ and without this the common ground of the Transatlantic relationship has begun to wither. The end of the Cold War allowed many in ‘the West’ to feel self-satisfied about the triumph of its values, but this looks a lot less secure since the onset of ‘the war on terror’ and the widespread curtailment of civil liberties in the US and UK.

‘North’ and ‘South’ – the two other bipolars – are less clear-cut today, with the rise of not just China and India, but the emergence of Brazil and South Africa as economic and regional leaders.

Other terms are equally problematic. Take ‘first world’, ‘second world’ and ‘third world’. In a planet without a second, communist world can there be a third world? Then there is the terminology of developed, developing and emerging countries. To some the latter two terms are seen as patronising; to others they imply a timescale of progress and wealth.

If we live in a world where these terms explain less than the problems they throw up what new terms will shape our world? We need route maps, compasses and directions. Firstly, they will have to make sense of the fuzzy, messy, multipolar state of the planet.
Secondly, they will have to address the crisis of the old terms, the issue of what progress is and the environmental challenge. And finally, they will have to answer the human quest for meaning and purpose in life and search for unifying stories which go to the heart of what it is to be human.

The future we know will be different; we can also be sure the way we describe and make sense of it will be very different!

“Bitublocks use up to 100% waste materials and avoid sending them to landfill, which is quite unheard of in the building industry. What’s more, less energy is required to manufacture the Bitublock than a traditional concrete block, and it’s about six times as strong, so it’s quite a high-performance product.”

Surely this has to be the way forward for the housing industry?

Source: Eurekalert

As an optimist I believe in the human capacity and desire to solve problems but I think the world will remain an unfair place with wealth unevenly distributed. Change will be forced upon us by one or more of the above.
Linda McLean

On bad days, my thoughts are gloomy; I feel that our (ie my, English, middle-income, happily partnered) immense personal freedoms are as nothing compared to the coming devastation of the dog days of American Imperialism and the acceleration of climate change as the East finally achieves the second industrial revolution. We will be the last country in the world to be devastated; but the illusion of safety, of separateness, is going to wear pretty thin pretty quickly.

On good days, I relish life. For instance, for gay people, happily, I think daily life will continue to become more possible in this country. I don’t think we will ever go back to the Dark Ages I had to fight my way through as a young man. So some things got better then…
Neil Bartlett

Viruses and disease; lack of clean water; ethnic wars; disputes over arable land
Linda McLean

Main issue is one of personal responsibility; are people going to wake from the daze of consumerism and realise that “the personal is political” cuts both ways. If we make consumer choice the central principle of our daily lives, we can kiss any meaningful politics in this country goodbye.
Neil Bartlett

If you are asking me I wonder if there will be a future division between people who have children and those who do not … this is because of our neglect of community life which is one of the things which makes all adults feel responsibility to all children and as we demonise children more and as they, quite rightly because of progressive policies, cost more there is a risk that the childless will try to opt out of shared responsibility. This is very gloomy and completely avoidable.

I am optimistic about the prospects for a better fairer world, but we need to work for it, not just assume it will happen by chance.
Fiona McTaggart, Labour MP from 1997, Government Minister 1997-2001