I feel privileged to have worked with a team of students of the Delft University of Technology on our future cities. Humanity is confronted with an ever-changing environment. At the rate and pace humanity is going now with respect to increasing globalization, climate change, increasing demand for food, water and other resources the future will not look positive for humanity. These challenges are enormous in scale and complexity, and we will need to take equally enormous leaps in our imagination to meet them successfully. With regards to the urban environment, the direction we are heading towards now will not sustain…
Poet D. H. Lawrence wrote, “I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea,” creating a metaphor of connectedness and implicit oneness with the world. This quote signals the tension between the complex processes at work that govern our existence on Earth by inviting us to be reassured by our embodied entanglement within ecosystems, other than human entities, and microbial others. Reflective of the scope of what this review sets out to accomplish, our article explores these…
Transforming and regenerating the Earth as well as our development pattern will be useful to future generations. The well-being of our future will be dependent on how we can produce technology that can govern our climate, health, social equity and stability. Industry 4.0 emerged from innovative digital technology to create value creation, whilst Society 5.0 is argued as a human-centered society that balances economic advancement with Industry 4.0. On the other hand, the environment has provided us with natural resources that speed up the growth of our industries and economies towards sustainability. Technology 4.0 can be used to mitigate and…
Virtually all organisms, including humans, are, in a real sense, sunlight transmogrified, temporary waypoints in the flow of energy. Ecological succession, viewed from a thermodynamic perspective, is a process that maximizes the capture and degradation of energy. Similarly, the tendency for life to become more complex over the past 3.5 billion years (as well as the overall increase in biomass and organismal diversity through time) is not due simply to natural selection, as most evolutionists still argue, but also to nature's efforts to grab more and more of the sun's flow. The slow burn that characterizes life enables ecological systems…
