How long can this feast go on? The peak in pumping oil is near, around 2015, and it is estimated that the oil will all be gone in 30 years. This was said back in the 1970s, you say. I say that in the 1970s we did not pay regularly more than 100 dollars a barrel for crude. We do not want to think about the consequences. How are we then going to transport people and goods? How will we build houses, heat homes, construct roads and railways, and how will we farm? Not to mention our needs for everyday living. How will our already ailing economy respond to a real shortage of oil and how will the superpowers look after their own interests?

Let’s be optimistic. Human life will continue after oil. We will build an electric society.

I see wind and sun on the horizon for massive new electricity generation capacity, as well as other renewable energy sources for heating. Renewables are growing at rates never seen before, faster than any other energy sector, with record investments in 2010 of 160 billion euro despite the poor economic situation. Wind power reached a capacity exceeding 200 GW_p and solar electricity 67 GW_p corresponding to the electrical output from 60 and 8 nuclear power plants, respectively. In addition, installed solar heat reached 200 GW_th in the same year.

During the past five years photo voltaics (PV) technology has experienced a technology breakthrough, and the cost of solar grade silicon has dropped from 4.5$/W_pto 1.2$/W_p. What does this mean? We can all become electricity producers, PV panels are as efficient in your house as in a large multi-megawatt system. What we do not yet have is a smart electrical network that is capable of handling millions of small electricity producers. The consumer market will probably soon see third generation solar cells that provide charging for our electronic appliances. PV technology is a multi – billion business today. Finland has no government plan for using solar energy. We should have. It works here from March till October as well as in Berlin, and in the spring time it works much better due to the lower temperatures and the reflection from snow, for both PV and solar heat.

I would like to see massive building of wind power installations in Finland. We have a generating potential exceeding the output from 20 nuclear power plants. Our strict regulation of land use has done much harm to the development of wind power. We have extensive domestic know how and manufacturing capacity. Why not utilize this potential for export and employment?  Wind and solar electricity capacity can both be balanced by hydropower and by gas–fired power plants, as the Germans are already doing.

I suggest that we take serious measures to get ready for the electric society. We should build high-speed tracks from Turku to St. Petersburg and from Helsinki to Oulu. We should build double tracks between the major cities, where rail terminals will be needed from which goods will be delivered by electric cars to companies and shopping malls.  For transportation to remote villages and for farming we will have biodiesel obtained from wood. This could amount to a maximum of one million tons a year, a quarter of the consumption by transport in Finland today, but it would be enough. Finally we should cut our energy consumption by 25%, and realize that we would not suffer much.

I recently looked at the figures for electricity consumption in Canada. Between 1971 and 2005 consumption had almost tripled. The same is true for Finland. I lived in the 1970s and I think I was happier in those days than today with all this consumption around.

Jouko Korppi-Tommola, Professor in Physical Chemistry, Department of Chemistry, NanoscienceCenter, University of Jyväskylä

Between 1981 and 2008, the world population increased by 2 billion, but the number of poor was reduced by 650 million. For the first time ever, there has been a decline in the poverty rate and the number of people in extreme poverty in all six regions of the developing world.

However, we are not out of the woods yet. We will still have some 1 billion people living below $1.25 in 2015, but the trend is promising. Similarly, The Economist reports that internal migration within China from inland towards the coast has been slowing down. Over 90 % of people under 30 in rural areas are already working in jobs outside of agriculture.

An ever-growing part of the global population is escaping from poverty and climbing the economic ladder of prosperity. Naturally, the differences are still vast, but the gap is narrowing.

Let’s consider a few of the facts that Matt Ridley laid out in his recent book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. Actually, it’s rather hard not to be an optimist, considering these recent developments: we are getting richer and healthier, and living longer.

It’s easier to see this by putting things in perspective. Let’s use the year 1955 as a basis for comparison. In that year, the average Finn earned less than the average person living in Botswana today. Life expectancy has declined in only three countries in the 50 years since 1955: in Russia, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe. The infant survival rate has increased in every country in the world. In those 50 years, the real income per head has increased in all but six countries (Afghanistan, Haiti, Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Somalia).

So this is not only a developed world phenomenon. Almost all people everywhere are improving their lives. Some are progressing a little bit slower than others, but they are improving nevertheless. At the same time, we are changing the definition of poverty. There will always be poverty in relative terms, unless everyone is coerced to become exactly equal on all terms. Absolute poverty is another matter, but let’s put things into perspective once again.

According to a recent Heritage study, the average European has less living space than a typical poor person in the US. Government survey data from 2005 reveals that the average American family household defined as “poor” lives in a house or an apartment with air conditioning, a cable or satellite TV, one or more cars (a third have two or more), two TV sets, a clothes washer and dryer, and if they have children, they play with an Xbox or PlayStation. It’s important to remember that the criteria for being poor were defined by the government itself.

It’s easy to see only the areas where we still need major improvements, but it’s just as easy to take a myopic view of the great developments and achievements of the past few decades, or even centuries. Who would still love to live in the “good old days” without the Internet, mobile phones, coffee makers, and all the other smaller or larger innovations that have enabled our current standard of living and that even poor households can afford – at least, in some parts of the world.

Sometimes the innovation and technology deployment cycles are so rapid that we are “reinventing” things in just a few decades. For example, a telephone booth is that wonderful invention that enables you to speak on your mobile phone privately in a public space. Or you can have your streamed audio playlist interrupted by sponsored messages for a free service (previously known as a radio programme).

The next time you hear someone telling you how bad a shape the world is in, maybe it’s worth pausing a moment and looking around. What are all the things we take for granted that did not exist 50 years ago?

Petri Kajander, Executive director, Libera

The Royal Society published a paper in March 2011 describing developments in scientific publications and in research and development in general. The USA has dominated both the quantity and the quality tables for scientific publications, with the UK in second place, reflecting the dominance of the English language. China has now passed the UK in the table for publications written in English, and one year ago the shares were: USA 21 % (down from 26 % in 2004-2008), China 10.2 % (up from 4.4 %) and UK 6.5 % (down from 7.1 %). If these trends continue, China will overtake the USA before 2020. China’s rise is the most impressive but Brazil, India and South Korea are following fast behind and will in the near future overtake France and Japan. This is not all; many fast developing countries such as Turkey, Iran and South Africa are substantially increasing their R&D efforts.

The results of the comparison of the number of publications are not surprising. They reflect the increase in R&D funding globally (45 % from 2002 to 2007) and in developing countries in particular. In Turkey for example R&D spending rose almost six-fold between 1995 and 2007. But what has happened to funding for Finnish R&D between 1995 and 2008? According to the Academy’s ‘The state and quality of scientific research in Finland’ report, funding has not increased when taking inflation into account. In euros the increase in total R&D spending was 18.6 % between 2003 and 2008, and in the university sector it was 17.3 %.

Compared to the global level of 45 % the Finnish figures are clearly smaller, and this is automatically reflected in the share of Finnish publications in scientific literature. The USA’s figures are now at least 20 % down from those in the period 2004-2008. Finland’s average share was 0.66 % during 2003-2007, and if we have declined in the same way as the USA we could now be at 0.53 %. If we do not increase the R&D budget at the same rate as the global figures, we will lose our share in the number of publications. Is that important?

The quality of research is more difficult to evaluate. The common method is to calculate citations. According to the Royal Society report, the USA is the leading country for citations: 30 % (in 2004-2008, the figure is down from 36 % in 1999-2003). The UK is still in second place but China has increased its share from zero to 4 % in the period. The Academy’s report does not give the number of citations in a similar way but gives the relative number of citations, and here Finland stands at the average level for the OECD countries and well above China. In the same way as for quantity, the figures for quality for Finnish publications have declined. That must be important. It is said that Finnish scientific research is in crisis and we should look at the USA and their best universities. According to the figures, the USA is in at least as serious a crisis as Finland.

The university funding plans produced by the Ministry of Education will place more emphasis on the quality of publications. The publications forum (Julkaisuforumi) has therefore ranked publications and is trying to direct Finnish scientists to publishing in better journals. The idea of publishing better but less is welcome, but it may have a very significant impact on Finnish university research, including the composition and content of PhD theses.

The debate has been going on for a long time as to which are more important: publications in highly-ranked journals or practical innovations that can be commercialized. Are the developing countries rising in the publication rankings because of their growing economy and GNP or is it vice versa. This is the chicken and egg problem again: which comes first, high-level science or an improved economy? I think they cannot be separated but form an integral system supporting each other. In Finland we need both. Very basic research is needed – even driven by curiosity – and innovations may grow from that. In the best cases the research can be published in magazines such as Science or Nature, and can be patented and utilized commercially without any contradiction with basic and applied science. The research topic must then be relevant and important, but our world and society is not lacking in important research topics in energy, environment, life sciences or materials. By selecting research topics intelligently and with reasonable funding we can compete successfully.

I challenge Academy Professor Olli Ikkala from Aalto University to write the next blog.

Markku Leskelä, Professor, Department of Chemistry, University of Helsinki

For me something big, something meaningful is related to understanding the world – life, the human brain, and the universe – and using this knowledge to build enablers of a joyful life. And, yes, it means a lot of work, with something new every day and something familiar, a growing framework that is repeated thousands of times.

Learning means asking questions and being brave. It requires space for failure, an open mind for corrective action, and being merciful.  For me it means access to referred and open information and communication with diverse sets of people, but even more it means learning by doing and doing together. Instead of a pure trial and error approach, I prefer a combination of quantitative modelling and building tangible prototypes.

One person can achieve much, but human culture is much more than this: it is layers of results from many people – and in the end it may be much more than the sum of the results from individuals. The end result depends on the system – the components, the interactions between them, the function of the system and its context.

A simple example is a study in which two human children succeeded in winning the reward in a test that required collaboration, but two chimpanzees failed. The researchers concluded that a human being has the ability to follow others and add their own work contribution, in this case the ability to share, even where there is no immediate personal benefit.

A more complex example is the ecosystem on earth with its producers, consumers, and decomposers. We all have roles in various ecosystems. According to R. Hausmann et.al. “The secret to modernity is that we collectively use large volumes of knowledge, while each one of us holds only a few bits of it. Society functions because its members form webs that allow them to specialize and share their knowledge with others.”

People can now build systems – such as banks, internet, social networks, future smart space with embedded electronics – and at the same time they have more tools to study the performance of these systems. But they may also have cause to learn more about them in order to solve problems relating to privacy, safety, health, the environment, etc.

People can have ideals, and can admire and follow other people. They can have goals and work for them. But it is easier for them to keep working even on a bad day, if they love their work even more than the goal of the work.

In nature, strong materials – such as spider silk or nacre – are hybrid structures of rigid and soft components. The materials are strong even in cases with relatively weak interaction between the different elements. Multi scale components must have the right structure.

The same kinds of laws have been noticed in social networks. Structure matters. Complex systems seem to have universal properties determined by the relation between the structure and the function at different scales. Many social and biological systems develop according to bottom-up rules that lead to systems that can be described by so called scale free networks. So it is possible to study the performance of human cells and use the results of this study to understand how research results are applied in the network of researchers.

Years ago I asked the same girl about the future device that she would like to have. Without hesitation she replied: a flying car. That is quite a challenge for engineers. Dealing with  electromagnetic fields is easier than working against gravitation. This leads to the prediction that we will have smart, automatic cars that interact with each other and the environment before we have our own flying cars. However, the development of lightweight, functional materials, energy sources and storage, and powerful energy efficient computing will give us the tools to make possible the concept of having our own flying vehicles.

I challenge Docent Jonna Häkkilä from the University of Oulu, Computer Science (HCI) to write the next blog.

Asta Kärkkäinen, Principal Scientist, System Design and Technologies, Nokia Research Center

The rapid growth of knowledge in science and engineering is reducing the “half-life” of Bachelors and advanced degrees. Half-life refers to the time it takes for the degree to lose half its value. Moreover, new fields are constantly emerging (e.g. nanotechnology, biotechnology, and informatics).

In the 1960s, a typical engineer with an advanced degree would have no more than 2-3 jobs during his or her lifetime. In contrast, today’s engineers are changing jobs every 2-3 years because corporations are downsizing, outsourcing and offshoring at a similar pace. By some estimates, today’s engineers will have changed jobs at least 10 times before they turn 40 years of age.

Private engineering firms are well aware of the importance of a high-quality and competent workforce. As remarked by Bill Gates, global corporations make decisions about where to locate a new plant or an R&D facility based not on labor cost but on the availability of technically savvy workforce.

The Lifelong Learning Imperative project was initiated by the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) to assess current practices in lifelong learning for engineering professionals, reexamine the underlying assumptions behind those practices, and outline strategies for addressing unmet needs. The project Steering Committee consisted of corporate executives and university leaders.

Following a 2009 framing workshop, the project team led by Deba Dutta, NAE Scholar in Resident and Dean of the Graduate College at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, conducted a survey of engineering professionals and interviewed several engineering executives.

Findings of the study indicate that the current infrastructure in the US for lifelong learning for engineers is ad-hoc and inadequate for the demands of the 21st century.

The survey results point to career growth as the major motivation for lifelong learning amongst engineers. Many feel that lack of time and finances are the primary obstacles that prevent them from engaging in lifelong learning.

An overwhelming majority of surveyed engineers expect businesses (industries) to play the leading role and in collaboration with universities and professional societies should develop a national framework. But, small to medium enterprises (SMEs) face significant challenges since they do not have the necessary resources and often focus on how to survive in the fiercely competitive global marketplace.

The surveyed engineers also believe that lifelong learning programs in the U.S. must be directed at learning business practices in other countries.

A final workshop in the October 2011 convened academic, government and corporate experts to discuss next steps. A key recommendation to industry, academia, professional societies, and policymakers is to work together to develop a national framework for lifelong learning for engineers.

The LLI project final report is to be published soon.

Debasish Dutta, Professor, University of Illinois

Richard Smalley

In fact, water is emerging as a key issue that may determine if our world is heading towards competition or collaboration. Water scientists worldwide have been ringing the alarm bells for an impending water crisis, but with limited success.

This issue is particularly pronounced in Asia, where more than half of the world population lives, but is also highly relevant in other areas, such as Southern Europe, parts of the USA, Africa and the Middle East. To give just one example, South Asia accounts for more than 21% of the world’s population, but has access to less than 10% of global water resources. This unbalance is expected to grow worse due to the increasing population, industrialization and climate change. In the coming years, water scarcity is expected to create obstacles to growth in several emerging countries that are still currently enjoying rapid economic growth, even in the midst of the present debt crisis. When we add to this the simultaneous deterioration in water quality, we can see the enormity of the challenge that we as mankind are facing.

Freshwater, which accounts for less than 3% of global water resources, is like the bloodstream for the entire biosphere (and surprisingly only 0.006% of it flows in rivers!). Due to its scarcity, increasing demand and worsening quality, various efforts have been made to produce potable water from seawater.

The technological challenges are mainly related to providing sanitation and water that is safe for drinking, and water that is clean enough for various industrial purposes. It is well-known that every year millions of children die from preventable water-borne diseases. The technology and resources exist and are available, but the issue is rather to what extent all stakeholders have access to them and in particular whether the treatment technologies are sufficiently cost-efficient for the different practical applications.

Here in Finland we have numerous SMEs and major companies operating in highly relevant sectors, such as Kemira, Metso and Outotec, to name just a few, for which the above considerations offer huge business opportunities. Looked at from another angle, as the title of this blog suggests, water is everybody’s business!

I challenge Professor Markku Leskelä from the University of Helsinki to write the next blog.

Mika Sillanpää, Professor, Lappeenranta University of Technology

From little Acorns mighty oaks do grow or, in this case, mighty ARMs. Today ARM Ltd (the expansion of the acronym was dropped 20 years ago!) supplies the microprocessor technology for most of the world’s mobile electronics, including iconic products such as Apple’s iPod, iPhone and iPad, mobile phone handsets from Nokia, Samsung, HTC and others, and a whole range of less visible computer systems embedded into cars, telecoms, and many other familiar consumer products. To date well over 20 billion ARM processors have been shipped by ARMs host of semiconductor partners, which amounts to around 3 ARMs for every person on planet earth. Although the distribution is far from even between rich and poor, there can be hardly a person on earth who has not at some time used an ARM to make a phone call, such is the pervasive nature of the electronic fabric of modern life.

The ARM isn’t just useful for everyday life, either. It can contribute at the leading-edge of scientific research, as in my current SpiNNaker (say “Spiking Neural Network Architecture quickly!) project. SpiNNaker will ultimately deploy a million ARM processors in a single connected machine built to run real-time models of how the brain works. Although a million processors is a formidable computing resource, it is sufficient only to support network models of about 1% of the complexity of the human brain. Still, these are much richer models than can currently be run in real time even on large supercomputers, so we hope and expect that the ARM will play a role in advancing our understanding of the principles of operation of the brain, which still remains as one of the great mysteries at the frontiers of science.

The fundamental problem in building real-time brain models is the very high connectivity of the biological system. Each neuron (brain cell) connects to thousands – sometimes hundreds of thousands – of other neurons. The physical connectivity of the biology cannot be replicated inside a computer, but it can be replicated by logical connectivity because electrical wires are very much faster than biological wires. In SpiNNaker biological spikes (which are the predominant means of conveying real-time information in the brain) are represented by electronic packets of information that can be conveyed very rapidly through a packet-switched network across the machine. The precise details of the simulated network are translated into the routing paths that the packets take within the machine, travelling from a neuron modeled on one processor to many targets on other processors. It is SpiNNaker’s ability to carry very large numbers of very small multicast packets that makes it uniquely-suited to the brain-modelling task.

With SpiNNaker we hope to create a computing platform that can be used by neuroscientists and psychologists to test their hypotheses of neural information processing, the result of which will be increased understanding of the principles of information processing in the brain. This could lead to applications in areas such as robotics, security, medicine, automotive crash avoidance and other forms of driver assistance, computer vision and speech understanding.

The benefits of knowing exactly how our own brains work are really hard to foresee, and as yet we have no idea just how difficult reaching this level of understanding will ultimately prove to be. Our hope is that SpiNNaker will represent a useful step towards achieving this Grand Challenge goal.

Steve Furber, Professor of Computer Engineering, the University of Manchester,
2010 Millennium Technology Prize Laureate

Also, the research world is divided into small kingdoms ruled over by professors and funded by multiple streams of small grants sufficient only to employ one post-doc and a graduate student. To keep a research group going and growing, grant applications have to be written continuously, an occupation that in many cases takes close to 20% of one’s working time. To guarantee a reasonable success rate, project proposals follow current research trends, do not represent overly-large risk, and do not offend the potential evaluators in any way. Research supposed to be ‘boldly going where no-one has gone before’ has become risk-averse business as usual in which one research group looks much like any other.

On the business side, I recently talked to someone who did establish a startup company and made it a success. After expansion to a medium-size enterprise with about a hundred employees, he noted a drastic change in the way the company operated – the group of friends who used to discuss the big picture of what to do over coffee and then got down to doing what was needed had been replaced by accountants, lawyers and a variety of managers. His honest question was: “How did we turn overnight from reasonable people with high morale and a strong work ethic into either mindless children or egoistic crooks whose actions need to be monitored and controlled at all times?” To me this spells a more general observation – small enterprises are much better equipped to exploit the potential offered by new ideas, larger companies tend to walk well-trodden paths avoiding errors at all costs.

“This place is too safe” is a quote by the chair of a panel evaluating the quality of teaching and education  at Aalto University. His point was that teachers and students in our universities enjoy very little accountability for their actions: If the teaching you provide is bad you’ll see fewer students in class – but the class will anyway be repeated next year. Don’t show up in class / fail all exams – and you’ll be given endless opportunities to try again. This type of atmosphere simply doesn’t foster excellence amongst either teachers or students, nor does it encourage the time-consuming but highly-rewarding interaction between the competent and the ingenious. Almost everyone in the innovation chain – students, researchers, business managers – operate in comfort zones where the status quo is maintained with a very high degree of certainty and where big gains are difficult to achieve.

All this comes back to the question of how to develop an academic environment that provides greater stimulus for innovation, and a society willing and capable to act on the opportunities which emerge. Yes, increasing research funding will help, as will altering funding structures to improve the recognition of innovative ideas amongst the mass of ‘more of the same’ research. (And if we believe that innovations will save the economy, please do not cut university funding!). We can also help by creating effective funding mechanisms for startup companies. (And let’s think of ways other than SHOKs – the biggest consensus machines I’ve seen for a long time…) But fundamentally I think we need to do something much more difficult: We academics need to change the way we think about our role in society.

The five years spent at university shape the course of our young students’ lives in many different ways. This is the time to encourage each generation to become active members of the community, to be responsible for their actions (and non-actions), to be international and culturally open-minded, and – first and foremost – take their futures into their own hands. At one and the same time, we have to educate them to both generate new knowledge and discover novel solutions to difficult problems. Having such individuals in both academia and business life and encouraging them to interact will foster the development of research ideas into business models much more effectively than any type of organizational reform I can think of. But we need to do this quickly – seven billion people are out there waiting for food, water, energy, care and cure.

I challenge Dr. Asta Kärkkäinen from Nokia to write the next blog.

Tuija Pulkkinen, Dean, Aalto University, School of Electrical Engineering

Enter Open Innovation, or Innovation 1.0. Management acknowledges that “not all good ideas reside inside our organization” and creates innovation goals – goals such as Procter & Gamble’s requirement that more than half of the ideas the company explores should be externally sourced. Unquestionably this adds to the tolerance for idea generation inside organizations.

Whirlpool went even further when it decided that each business unit head should, on pain of losing 10% of their budget, find at least three radical and innovative ideas to fund. Shell’s pioneering “GameChanger” program offers an opening for employees, academics and entrepreneurs to come and tell about their energy-related ideas with the potential reward of securing Shell as an angel investor and organizational mentor. But as any game-changer will tell you, that’s now old news.

It’s high time to move forward to Innovation 2.0. I will be introducing new innovation principles that begin to crack open our collective capacity for innovation. Of course, some of these principles are still maturing but they are well worth noting as signals of change. Times are such that new innovation capabilities are sorely needed! So, here we go.

The first principle of Innovation 2.0 is resource morphing. This is the ability of an organization or a person to free a particular resource from its common or previous use and repurpose it on the go. While Google may be using an old paper mill as a server farm, Biocurious in Silicon Valley seeks to “build a community biology lab for amateurs, inventors, entrepreneurs, and anyone who wants to experiment with friends”. Erin Gentry and her co-founders at Biocurious have overcome the high cost of laboratory space and equipment by starting their venture in a garage and buying used equipment from eBay. In the process they have repurposed an activity once carried out only in science and corporate labs into an activity to do with friends!

The second principle of Innovation 2.0 is “gameful engagement”. Jane McGonigal uses this term to describe how games can be harnessed to bring the ideas and energy of many thousands of people to address a real-life issue and enable them to feel the thrill of a personal epic win, something reality is supposedly short of. For example, “World Without Oil” was a “massively collaborative imagining” of how to cope with an energy shortage. Nineteen hundred players, motivated by the slogan “Play it – before you live it”, thus narrated alternative realities.

Collective hacking is the third principle of Innovation 2.0. Hacking entered the public consciousness when, at the end of the last century, Eric Raymond wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar. No longer the exclusive domain of software coders, hacking has spread into different walks of life. For example, as described by the Institute for the Future, Ariel Waldman, an open source scientist, has organized Science Hack Days, “a 48-hour, all-night event that brings together designers, developers, scientists and people with good ideas in the same physical space for a brief but intense period of collaboration, hacking, and building ‘cool stuff’.” The nature of a “hack” is to provide a quick solution to a problem. As such, it may not be the most elegant solution but is often the cleverest. It is also a “mashup”: A hack mixes data from different sources in novel ways.

It is now up to you, Dear Reader, to hack up the fourth and fifth principle of Innovation 2.0.

Liisa Välikangas, Aalto University and the Institute for the Future, Palo Alto, California, USA

And so what of it? We better comprehend scale in the world where we live if we consider first that one exabyte could capture the contents of 50,000 Libraries of Congress. Not impressed yet? Consider then that our internet carries fifty exabytes annually, corresponding to an everyday traffic of the equivalent of 150 billion books. There you go!

Contrary to widespread public belief, this internet capacity has very little to do with satellites, and even less with cellular phones. The overwhelming majority of the internet traffic is carried by a fiberglass web. The WWW is first and foremost an optical fiber network, completed at the edges, true enough, with space, cellular, and last-mile access networks. What length of fiber optics is needed for all this? Answer: too long, and never ever enough! Today, the existing fiberglass web represents a 1.5 billion kilometers infrastructure: enough to circle the Earth 37,000 times, or to reach the planet Saturn. Five years from now, this length will have doubled. Currently, optical fibers are deployed worldwide at a global rate of five kilometers per second, or fifteen times the speed of sound. Even so, there are huge gaps in the geographical distribution (we will come back to this below).

Strictly, the Internet was the invention of TCP/IP that in turn enabled HTML websites, e-mail and ecommerce, among others. Before it could revolutionize our society, it had to be implemented over some physical network in order to become what we experience today, with further promise for expansion in the future. In this respect, we should not forget two great inventions of the previous halfcentury: the Laser (including semiconductor chips and photo-receivers), and the optical fiber.

However, even with the best lasers and fibers the most powerful signals will fade after 100 km: too short for global dimensions, and subject to a desperate electronic bottleneck if conventional amplifiers are used. The optical amplifier, the so-called EDFA, a piece of fiber lightly doped with the rare-earth erbium, came to the rescue and now optical fiber trunks span from several hundred kilometers to over 10,000 kilometers, on land and undersea, with internet signals reaching the far end of the fiber at 2/3 the speed of light. Most importantly, the internet light signals are now packed into hundreds of multicolored (wavelength) channels, each one running at its own speed between GIGA and 1,000 GIGA bytes per second.

So far, between the Internet and the fiberglass webs, this has been a happy “He and She” marriage (“She” poetically to recall Mother Earth, or course…). So far? Is there a rumor of discontent? Well, yes, the household may soon run short of bandwidth, the bread-winner.

In the 2005 European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC’05), the Chairman, Prof. David Payne, asked me to do the impossible: deliver a keynote paper that would help stimulate a depressed community, still recovering and unconsoled from the “telecom bubble”. He suggested the title “Optical Communications in 2025”. Safe enough to allow the luxury of a dream? After some precise searching on Internet growth statistics, and carefully analyzing optical fiber capacity using the best tangential approach to the immutable limits of Claude Shannon, I quickly realized that available bandwidth might rapidly fall short of any “Optical Moore’s Law” projections, and that we were well advanced in the paradigm. My talk concluded that, on Dec.31th, 2025, at midnight, the Internet will turn into the World Wide Wait. Just kidding here, but this is to convey the “smell the coffee” moment.

“A foreseeable end of the Optical Moore’s Law?” It took a few years for the message to really sink in. Since then, papers about the subject have flourished. Last month, at ECOC’11, David Payne, while addressing the “capacity crunch” issue, advanced the ticking clock to 2020. Eight years is not much to fix the looming problem, unless we start thinking of limiting the internet growth, from initially exponential to steady linear, at the new pace of technology. Any thoughts on its impact on society, any volunteers on how to do that ?

Emmanuel Desurvire, 2008 Millennium Technology Prize Laureate