When Kalkin woke up in 2045, it found a world that had radically changed, and it was the

chance child in it. The city it saw, through eyes it couldn't quite control, attached to a body that wasn't its own, had qualities of a green lush forest. High rises standing green like massive trees.

Hanging vertical gardens cascaded down the front of the buildings, bearing full with fragrant flowers and fruit. The body moved through the grassy streets devoid of any cars along well-worn paths toward a big hall. A flurry of small autonomous zeppelins and quadrocopters moved in through the top of

the building. The market was written in mossy letters over the entrance. Inside, row after row of common and exotic fresh produce was displayed, together with everything you care to imagine, ever one time fitting on a table.

There was heavy bartering between sellers and customers. It was becoming clear that mostly everyone was a seller as well as a customer. People knew each other, and the atmosphere was like a big party. Small, but tough-looking girls' hands stretched out at one place and gave small painted what

looked like hand-made birthday cards to a guy in a funky blue overall. A friendly smile, and in a heads-up display a number in the right bottom corner increased by some. A little later, a couple of delicious-looking pawpaws exchanged hands and the overlay number

decreased by a similar amount. When the eyes walked on, another part of the building came into view. It looked a bit like a huge warehouse, with robots buzzing and big shelves with a thousand

small and large boxes humming along. Next to it was a place where corn, potato, and what looked like starchy little tubers were kept. Manufacture everything corner, a sign said. A small, cute-looking robot moved some of the starchy material into a big container

that was attached to a series of tubes that looked like a little refinery made from glass, fluids bubbling along in multiple colors. Another small robot came by with a tray with cool-looking running shoes on it.

Delivery for Ping, the screen read, the girl's hands picking up the shoes. A side entrance let the low-hanging afternoon sun through, washing the eyes into a bright, blinding white. The time coin counter clicked down a notch.

On the strip of an airfield, a whale like Zeppelin waited for its passengers to board. The eyes of the waiting passengers turned towards Ping as she approached, riding her electric bicycle. The older guy with a leather cowboy hat spotted a huge grin when he spotted the arrival.

The two children stopped in their tracks and raced towards Ping to give her a hug. On board the airship, talk revolved around how great the winter had been for the trees and that the harvest finally showed signs that all these years of forest gardening had

been successful. The airship lifted, revealing the green city on the one side, extending into what looked like an endless green forest where the old abandoned church tower from former times sticking out. Solar panels on the rooftops, glinting randomly in between.

Small and big windmills rising through the forest everywhere. A call from the hyperborea interrupted the scene and showed a young man in one of the windows. Hello Ping, looking forward to see you in Parson again. You won't believe how much has changed here.

The birds in spring are deafening. You guys, best land near Milkwood Farm. With the airship silently descending, one could make out little mounds with glassy sides and houses under trees and an odd village made out of old shipping containers and small

mud huts inside a hedge. Everything was blooming, all the trees overbearing with fruit, leafy vegetables all throughout. Small robots busily roaming throughout some small quadrocopters, obviously picking some higher hanging fruit from the tree.

The guy from the hyperborea call was standing next to the landing spot where the airship slowly descended, giving a warm hug to every one of the exiting group. The world was spinning as Ping fell straight on the back into the lush grass, leaving the blue sky with the puffy pink clouds framed by the leveraged green forest in view.

So great, Ping said. That moment, Kalkine's consciousness agreed with all its electronic neurons, wishing that it could just be there with the group in that lovely, lush valley.

Hello everybody. I hope you liked this little peek into the future. It's a future I find worth living for. It's a future I find I think has a possibility of becoming reality. It's actually a future that I try with all that I can to make possible, to make real.

You might think this is a future that's like science fiction. It might never become reality. It's so far out, green cities and airships flying through the air.

I think, well, we did a podcast called Radio Prototyping. We had 40 episodes in that podcast over the span of about five to six years where we

looked at projects that were all going into that direction, a direction that could create that future. There were so many projects, I could never ever show them all here, that were so very,

very inspiring. All these projects, all these topics that we covered, put a big red spot on a really big problem that we have in society, and that was money.

I'm definitely not the person to talk about monetary policies, but I think everybody can agree that our current system is creating a lot of inequality. So with all these little projects pointing to that future, so when we started the podcast

We started the podcast, it was just about when the 3D printing revolution hit. That was about seven years ago, way before the first MakerBot hit the store shelves. Throughout those years, we saw tiny houses were built for $1,000.

We saw robotic technology exploding and leaving you breathless with all the capabilities. Every episode we did, there was a new robot coming to the scene that was even more capable, was running along, had artificial intelligence and all these things.

And these things all happened in the last seven years. So our main topic for the podcast became creating a society or imagining a society without money. That was hugely inspiring. That was so inspiring me that I kind of imagined a future where all these projects had devolved.

A future that was kind of a garden Eden, a futuristic garden Eden, that actually incorporated technology that did make us human evolve even more and freed us from labor and freed

us from inequality and all the bad things. But let me highlight some of the things that we had in the science fiction story. Because that science fiction story came out of that podcast, that science fiction story

was something I imagined coming to life. Lots of these projects that we had had to do with, of course, natural things like cleaning

the planet and giving us, yeah, at that matter. So we started out the story in the green city. Green city is very achievable. Green city that feeds itself is also achievable. We have found all these really, really awesome projects starting from the roof, rooftop gardening.

In Toronto, if you put a rooftop garden on your new built house, you get money from the city. That's now, seven years ago when we started the podcast, this was just starting. People put like little pots on their roofs, and we're really proud of it. And there's a whole movement, greenroofs.org, that actually goes into that direction.

But it doesn't stop with rooftops. We had vertical gardens, big, huge towers that had farms every fifth floor that really were self-sufficient. You had solar panels that were lighting these farms on the windows.

But you also had neighbors connecting their balconies with vines and making them really green and making the whole facades green in neighborhoods all over the world. But also in the basement, the Persona O2 urban farm in Tokyo actually grows rice

in the basement of a high-rise building. It uses power that is generated by solar salts that are on the roof, and it also uses the rain that comes down from the side of the building and also from the roof. So you can have buildings that actually generate the food for its inhabitants.

But it's not only the buildings. It's also the parks. We put a lot of energy in parks to make them green and really livable, and a lot of water goes in them. But why don't we make them also edible?

Why don't we produce food in them? And a lot of small projects that are really big now are already happening, like Bontessen Garten in Berlin, or Stadt Garten, or the Cetil Beacon food forest, we actually created a small little forest that was almost all edible inside the city.

But if you create all this food or if you create products, you also need to exchange. So how do you do that without money? Or how do you do that with our current monetary system? Well, one of the big answers was databases. Putting together all, everybody, producers and consumers in big databases

so they can have direct contact creates a system that they don't have a level of abstraction in between. They don't have a middleman where people again talk to each other. But you still need the means of exchange.

So there's a really cool project called timecredits.com that says, okay, everybody's time is created equal, everybody has the same level of, you know, everybody's hour costs the same as the hour before, as the hour from the other person. And you can earn already time credits by doing social work in the UK.

And using cryptocurrencies as a means to share these time credits easily without any bank in between that kind of want to hoard money and not do anything about it. I think we're in a really good path. But also these databases are popping up everywhere.

Of course, you know Etsy, but there's also really cool thing called streetbank.com, where neighbors can share tools and can share their knowledge or can share their work. And as you can see, this is really successful.

It's happening all over the world. You can have do that in Berlin, there's already like 50 neighbors in my neighborhood who actually do that. And you can get everything from a shovel to somebody who helps you make a salad. And also, in Germany, we have food sharing.

This is a network of people who have an abundance of food and want to share it with people because they would throw it away otherwise. So you don't need to throw away. It's like not having so much waste is really, really important. And of course, everybody wants to still have consumer goods in the future.

You start paying in the market and the little robot came to her with a little running shoes. Well, you can print shoes now. You can 3D print shoes now. And I first thought about that very distant future. The RepRap was such a great project

because it wanted to print 3D printers. So you don't even have to actually buy a 3D printer anymore. And the 3D printing becomes very sustainable now. The filler bot, which you don't see on the right-hand corner, is actually a recycle bot that makes filaments for every 3D printer you can imagine.

And it takes every plastic that can actually be recycled, like PET bottles, for example. But also there's biodegradable filament now, filament that you can throw the product on the compost heap and it actually disintegrates and doesn't produce more waste in our oceans.

And then we found robots. And robots freed our thought enormously because they would free us from work we didn't want to do. And I think we are in a huge trajectory

that that's going to happen. Society says, oh, they're going to steal our work and we are not going to have enough work for people, I think. And Mo Brins, my co-moderator on the podcast, also thinks that. Well, it's great. I don't want to clean toilets. I don't think a lot of people want to clean toilets for other people.

There are robots in every field you can imagine. Of course, automotive industries, but also farm robots, a little robot that picks grapes and runs on solar energy. It's already been in use. You have cleaning robots, of course, that clean your carpet and they're not even expensive anymore.

And you also want to move from place to place. And I think transportation is one of these silent revolutions, one of these revolutions that you don't see because all you see is these cars and they're in the mainstream. But in the background, a lot of really, really awesome ideas happening.

And still my favorite are airships. You all know it's about the failed airship adventure that we had in Germany. It's now a big pleasure hall where they wanted to build that. But in the meantime, they fixed the biggest problem of airships and that's that they use up helium while they're flying.

They don't need that anymore. They can compress the helium while they're flying and so they don't need any ballast because helium is a scarce resource and they don't have any, they have not much of it. And they're building these things. And this is a real photo. This thing is flying and this thing can lift the train.

And it's the aircraft. So it's amazing. You don't have to transport goods anymore. And then it's the e-bikes. They're popping up everywhere. Even my parents think about getting an e-bike because they're not that young anymore and they can move around. But e-bikes in every form and shape

and you can personal transport and transport small goods with them and they're really, really easy and also getting cheaper by the day. And if you have to have cars, I wanna have them run my compressed air. And these are two cars that actually do that already.

So that's the future of transportation. I can really get behind. But still we wanna need, we gonna need energy. And when we started out with a podcast, there wasn't much renewable energy happening. If it started out, yes,

you could buy really expensive solar panels that generated like 200 watts and people were kind of excited about it. But in the meantime, renewable energies have completely changed the energy field. Germany now produces 25% of the energy needs with renewables. That's crazy.

That's like in five years, we kind of moved from zero or like 2% water to like 25%. Of course you have solar, lots of solar, different solar technologies to get really cheap. They wanna print these now. There's like two facilities now in the world that actually print solar cells on cheap plastic sheets

and they're gonna get really cheap in the next two years. So everybody can put them on their roofs or on their windows or whatever. Of course you wanna use deserts and you don't wanna use the expensive solar panels. You can use the molten salt technology where you focus the solar beam and generate energy for that.

You have winds. I really like wind farms. They're not so loud as you might hear. If you ever have the opportunity to stand in one in the middle of the night, it's amazing. It's like standing in the utopian future, things generating energy and blinking all around you.

It's actually pretty beautiful sight. I don't know what people have against it. But also personal windmills, vertical windmills that are not loud, that don't have a lot of vibration going. It's really something we wanna have. What we didn't see in the story is water

because it didn't fly over water or you wouldn't even see it. But you have river flow energy generation. So you don't have to build huge dams anymore that destroy nature. They just use this natural river flow to generate energy. Of course you have wave energy generators that you just put in the ocean and they bump long and generate energy for that.

Tidal generators in Holland, they built now a huge tidal generation power station. And even generators that generate energy when you put in salt water on one side

and sweet water on the other. And the difference with, I don't know, I'm not a technician, but it generates energy and it's clean and nothing bad comes out of it. And of course you have biomass which I find still very difficult. You shouldn't grow any produce just to burn it to generate energy.

But if you have excess biomass, then that's obviously also a really good idea to use that to generate heat or generate energy. And the biggest thing is of course conversation using less energy. And the big companies are getting behind that. You know, all we all know,

these laptops now run 12 hours. When we started out, they run half an hour on batteries. Of course it's to do with battery technology as well but they just use less power. Everything use less power and it's really great. Great trajectory. And then we have the web. I think this is a web conference

and talking about the future of the web is a very hot debated topic. For me, there's only one project out there that actually can change the web. And that's Hyperborea. I don't know if anybody has heard about Hyperborea. It wants to restart the web and completely redo it.

It's peer-to-peer, it's secure, it's completely encrypted. It uses current technology like IPv6 and it's open. And it also tackles the hardware side because it supports project mesh net which wants to put like a Freifunk network

in the whole world based on that Hyperborea technology. And Hyperborea is already working. It's already working as a layer over the normal internet. You can get on it. It's a little difficult at the moment still because you have to install a couple of scripts

and you have to find a peer to exchange your cryptographic key and stuff. But it's, I think, the only way we can actually do something about the web is to completely restart it and redo it so nobody can actually interact, nobody can actually do bad things with it.

And then we see ping landing in the countryside. And the countryside is different than the city and I think most people here have come from the city. I come a little bit more from the countryside. It has different needs and the biggest needs are food and shelter.

Of course, it also will produce the little stuff that the city can't produce itself. But shelter is crazy because we have these villages, these suburbia that are not sustaining

and I need to move on a bit. So yeah, it's great. You can build three houses. You can build tiny houses for $1,000 and it's awesome because everybody can afford these houses and they're still very beautiful and you don't need to pave everything

and build mansions and stuff. And you can even build houses from old containers. How to do with the food? Food you do with permaculture. Permaculture has been a huge success movement and the combination of permaculture is actually edible forest gardens because forests is a really good system

where you don't need to do anything. Once you create a forest garden that actually produces food, it's just gonna run and it's just gonna produce food for you and you don't have to do any input. You don't have to do any water, you don't have to do any fertilization. I skip over the AI. That's just my little bridge for putting everything

that I can't really put in a box. That's my AI, the artificial intelligence takes care of. But what my point is with this talk is, well, this is not a future for everyone.

This is my future. I really like that future. I really wanna live in that future. But you might have a different idea of that future. But what is really important is that we all have really positive fantasies about the future because then we can change it. And that's a really big problem in current society where all science fiction is dystopian. Go to a Hollywood movie, any kind of Hollywood movie,

and it's gonna show you a world that's destruction and war and everything in the world is gonna blow apart or whatever. But this is not something that helps us. What helps us really is getting an idea how we wanna live, how we wanna live in the future, and how that's gonna work out.

I asked my Twitter timeline if they know any science fiction work that's actually positive and they came up with two or three books. You know, with an all science fiction that we have, there's nothing positive. It's all dystopian or it's some space opera that's so far out, we're never gonna get there because we are gonna have

planet destructive dystopia before that. The more visions we're gonna have, the more positive visions we're gonna have, the more overlap you're gonna see between those visions, the more we can actually see if we have a combined vision, a vision that we all wanna go to.

And that creates understanding between us. So I hope I inspired you a bit to create a vision, to share it with us, to share it with the world, to actually look positive into the future, and then find a way to make that future happen

for yourself and for everybody. Thank you very much.