Group Home
Lei Zhou
Post Doctoral Researcher
Biomedical Imaging Technology Center		  
Office:
531 Asbury Circle
Suite 531
Atlanta, GA 30322-4600
Tel:404.712.2696(shared with others)
Fax:404.712.2707(whole office)
mailto:lzhou5@emory.edu
 Mail:
Woodruff Memorial Building
1639 Pierce Drive, Suite 2001
Atlanta, GA 30322-4600

Maxims:

1. The principle(or say, the universe, the God) does everything for nothing.
道 常 无 为 而 无 不 为。
2. One will only be great if he never struggles for being great.
以 其 终 不 自 为 大 ， 故 能 成 其 大。
3. The spirit (or say idea) may be accepted over the world without the body's travelling around.
足 不 出 户 而 道 行 于 千 里 之 外。

 
Wisdom is born on a planet. However, wisdom will finally take a born from the womb of the mother planet, and sets steps into the universe. So do we human being on the earth. And this will happen within several hundred years.
Many scientists have predicted and warned a very doomful future: However, in my point of view, its not a problem at all.

Human has been being in a rapid developing era since 300 years ago. The innovations of steam engine, electricity, wireless and electronics, integrate circuit (IC) have continuously improved the life quality of human being. In the meantime, the knowledge of science increases in a faster rate and has actually prepared enough knowledge for us to create innovations that will bring us out of all crises as side products of present technology.

Energy Crisis

As the energy source, our sun is the nearly unlimited source of energy. It is about 600 Watt per square meter on the surface of earth. This is about 7.7 mega-watt per person, counting 10 billion population. Supposing that we will collect 1% of them, it will be 77kW per person, which is far more enough to hold a comfortable life for a person. Does not like burning gas and other fossil fuel, solar energy will not creat extra waste in either green house chemical form or extra waste heat form. It is definitely clean and safe.

Even without fossil fuel, we won't have to give up the convenience of transportation by vehicles. Electic vehicle is the solution. This does not mean that I am dreaming for an innovation of very high energy density battery, which is mostly impossible from the chemical law. The critical issues of electric car are the unacceptable charging time - operating time ratio and the limited operating distance. However, the density of existing gas station has been far more than enough to be refurnished in to "Battery Exchange Station", where a vehicle can pull out the low battery set and insert a full-charged one, and pay a fee.

Water Crisis

This is hardly considerable as a crisis. The nature is providing huge amount of fresh water by vaporizing water in sea. We can build fresh water collecting facilities on rain-rich water area, and build under water pipe to pump them to land. The energy of pumps can be gathered from tidal energy.

Food Crisis

The upper limit of total food production is another hot issue. Yes, we will mostly have no way to force the land to produce significantly more food than what we have got by applying any chemicals into the soil. However, nothing constrains us to rely with plant. Much simple life forms like algae are more efficient on converting solar energy into nutrition. I do not consider artificial life forms created by gene engineering could be an out-of-control threaten to human health. By finely tuning gene, biologists are expected to create new life forms that can be much more efficient on producing nutrition. Then with carefully balanced diet, food industry will be able to feed our population without depredating our nature mother.

Environment Crisis

After solved energy crisis and food crisis, the pressure to environment should have been greatly reduced. We can return many farm-land to the nature and convert inhabitable lands like disert to produce electricity and food. Then the biggest environment pressure is probably inhabitancy.

Now-a-day a house is not an independent inhabitable unit. It is more like a cell in a complex network. It needs freshwater supply, drain, power cable, information cable (telephone, cable TV, network), garbage collection, and gas pipe somewhere. When you are going to build a new house, you will have to pave all the pipes and cables to it. And the load of utility service will increase correspondingly. All of these increase the demand and load to the environment.

Fortunately, existing technique also enable some fast solution to these issues.

For water and drain, roof can be designed into a moisture collecting device and provide several gallons of freshwater. Most of used water can be mechanically filtered then chemically filted into non-drinkable water. Then the commercial drinking water filtering devices can provide drink water. Besides, there will need an automatic garbage packing system, which will collect solid dirts left on mechanical filter as well as sorting solid dirts. Instead of paying water bill and waste collecting bill, one will need to replace chemical filters in a periodical bias and carry packed solid waste to a collecting center.

For information, I do not consider it a good idea to bring optical fiber into each house. This is costly and hard to be maintained. Meanwhile, broadcasting wireless cannot provide enough bandwidth for broad band communication and creates too much radiation waste. Then how about directional wireless? For example, we can expand phase array radar technique into directional wireless communication. Houses will be nodes of a inter-house network. And the communication centers between inhabited area will be linked with powerful optical cable. The existing cell phone technique and dynamical routing technique can be the parents techniques for developping the new mode of wireless network.

By this mean, a new concept of "House Server" will be implied. There must be a powerful computer in each house to activate the network - routing and repeating. Certainly this server can not only serve the communication, but also a ready candidate of a family information center. All household electronics will become a device under this server. Universal sharing of media and flexible presentation/mixing and remote control will become true.

For this purpose, I strongly suggest to develop next generation computer architecture, next generation operating system, and next generation programming language for non-experts.

To make the house server architecture work, another two concepts of "House bus" and "build-in deveice wall-fixing structure" need to be introduced. All devices will be able to be fixed on the wall without breaking the integrality of a building. You will never need to drill ugly holes on wall and suffering damage to the building. And wherever you hang an electronics, you will be able to plug it into a nearby socket of house bus and play it under the universal control of house server. For example, you can construct your family theater without buying a whole system. You can use your DVD on your house server computer to play the movie to the wall-hanging large screen and to play the movie music to your preferred speakers. You do not have to be fixed in front of a computer desk when doing web surf or text editing. You can lie in you most comfortable sofa and hold a small keyboard/mouse pad that is pluged in a nearby house bus socket, and enjoy the effect displayed on the huge screen hung on the the wall.

For electricity, it might be the last thing that has to be delivered by wire. Fortunately it is the most convenient and cheapest one comparing with other pipes. Meanwhile, if an inhabited area neighbors with uninhabitable area, by creating a solar/wind energy plant nearby, with the help of a rechargeable battery pool, it will mostly be able to be a self-sufficient group, and reduce the cost of long range electricity transfer.

Species Crisis

With the above-mentioned improvement, I believe that there will no longer be any species crisis, if all countries agree to control its population effectively.

Certainly all above-mentioned future means a great house hold hardware cost, which is even unimaginable for extremely poor country. To protect our earth, we have to share our knowledge and spend our money on educating them and bring them into an environment-friendly living method. We share our civilization to protect the base of our civilization, the environment.

As an example, many persons criticize China that the huge income difference between the rich cities and poor mountain and rural areas will be a great drawback to the economical development of China. However, did they ever notice that the income difference between richest countries and poorest countries in the world is greater? I am very confident that China will get the problem calm down sooner or later, because the flow of labor is relatively free comparing with the visa barrier between rich and poor countries. Any person who was born in poor area will have significant chance to get a job in richer area because the government intends to educate them having comparable competency. The percentage of richer area will increase and the market will increase as well, and this boost the expanding of economical scale, until all citizens reach balanced income level and comparable life quality, like what have happend in all developed countries. The world needs a similar effort. All poor countries need to be helped to reach an enough income and technology level, or they will be forced to destroy the environment for alive. The key of solution will be the same: to sponsor their education and enable free international labor exchange.

Certainly this will increase safety issue. However, the solution is nearly ready. We are using many personal identification numbers in a modern life, such as social security number, credit card number, driver's licence number, staff number, insurance numbers, etc. Meanwhile, we have vehicle identification number for each legal vehicle. The present information technology enable us to greatly improve this system: to create a Universal Identification Number system. Each person, organization, computer, and significant property, will be assigned one when it enters the a country that support this system or is created. This number is globally accepted in all countries that agree to use this system. Each transaction will be labelled with all involved UIN holder and the time, and logged. Therefore any crimes will be easily tracked down to a very small suspicion group.

With the cooperation of all countries, I believe that the last threaten to the environment will be able to be overcome.

Health Crisis

From my eastern knowledge of human being, many modern health problem is not caused by outside causations. The work load of modern citizens are high. They have less time to adjust themselves. Thus the circulation of their body fluid became continuously abnormal, and permanent damage will be induced.

Unfortunately, werstern medical is not designed to tune a person, but to cure a person. I got angry many times in the USA because that the doctor refused to treat me until I was obviously sick. The fact is, when a person is obviously sick, and it is not caused by a infection, usually some permanent tissue or organ damage have happened, and any medical care will be able to make a cure.

Chinese medicine takes a different role. It does not cure a disease. It tunes your natural circulation and active your natural defending system to fight diseases and repair damages. The problem is that Chinese medicine is still not a science, but a practical technique. This greatly reduced its success ratio and made it legally unreliable in a modern scientific society.

Is it possible to make Chinese medicine a science? My answer is yes. Now-a-day the monitoring technology has enabled to reconstruct the three dimensional temperature (infrared radiation) and circulation status for at least part of a human body. By this, we will be able to research the function of Chinese medicine and Chinese medical treatment in a scientific way. Thereafter, the related Chinese medical diagnosis instruments will be designed and the technique will no long rely with personal experience.

Moreover, some 24 hours health monitoring system cound be developed with the above knowledge and family server system. By well tuning a body, I believe that most of uncurable modern health problem will become history.

Further future

All I have mentioned above are what I expect to see before I die. However, even all the above mentioned things would become true, it is not the end stage of human being. The earth is like a matrix or a womb. The human being is the fetus. We are in the nine month of the life of a fetus. We need a born, or die, because the earth cannot provide us forever material supply. We will be ready to be born when all the above-mentioned techniques become true.

Many science fiction writers implied a future of universe planet colonization. However, this must be not true. Have you ever seen that a new baby will intend to dig into another womb? This has never happened. And surely the future human being that obtains the technique of living as a tiny planet in a solar system will no longer want to return on to any planet. The reason is very simple: The sun provides much faster and clean and convenient energy source and the individual has been familiar with the power and force. He will never be able to bear the constraints of a natural life circle.

This is only a large scale prediction of the bright future of human being. It will be my great pleasure if I can participate in any advantages. I am going to enrich the content of this page to bring up and share more knowledge and information that will benefit human being. The more person who know this, the more chance that the human being will have a brighter future.