The Year of Acceleration

The Chinese calendar calls 2016 the Year of the Monkey. Perhaps it is appropriate for a country currently experiencing economic wild swings, and given both China’s size and its penchant to export, it may well be true for much of the rest of the world, as well. But that’s only economically. In high science and technology, though, the coming year will likely feel less like humanity collectively monkeying about — that we have done for years now — and more like true take-off, in a number of fields.

Why are we so optimistic As we write this, a private company that began life less than 15 years ago has succeeded in an endeavour that national space agencies have been struggling with for decades – landing a rocket stage back on Earth after launching it into space, vertically and gently.

Here’s what happened: The Falcon 9 rocket of SpaceX — founded by Elon Musk, the same guy who also revolutionised online payments with PayPal, cars with Tesla, and hopes to do the same for solar power with Solar City and for Artificial Intelligence with OpenAI – shot up, and while its second stage continued into space to deploy 11 satellites into orbit, its booster stage separated from it, fired its engines and landed back on the earth gracefully, some 10 kilometres from where it was launched.

SpaceX is not the first private company to land a rocket stage back safely. That was accomplished just last month by Blue Origin, another space start-up founded by Musk’s fellow billionaire entrepreneur Jeff Bezos of Amazon. This, by two private space companies, shows up national space agencies such as NASA, whose re-usable launch vehicle the Space Shuttle no longer flies, and India’s ISRO, which is still no further along than technology demonstrations, for what they are – lumbering giants. In the world of 2016, even space belongs to the nimble and the agile. “The Falcon has landed” is just one example of what we are going to witness in all kinds of space this coming year — not just outer space, but also inner space, and cyberspace. It’s the dramatic acceleration of science-based capabilities, thanks due to the coming together of technologies that have been in development for decades, new business models, and innovation.

Notice also in the Falcon story that the pace of innovation is accelerating. Before the Internet, digital technologies and this group of new age billionaires – not just Musk and Bezos but Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the Virgin Richard Branson, etc., —technologies took at least 30-40 years to mature and reach scale. The Internet itself took more than 30 years. Musk’s ventures seem to take less than half that time — SpaceX and Tesla were founded around the same time, in 2002 and 2003 respectively, and are already respectable businesses with proven technologies.

Thanks to advances in medicine, genomics, devices and digital technologies – again coming together with new business models and innovation — humanity is also on the verge, at the end of 2015, of breaking through in the treatment of deadly diseases, notably Cancer, Alzhei-mer’s and other mental illnesses.

All in all, this should be the Year of absolute Acceleration!