Article by: Asst. Prof. Suwan Juntiwasarakij, Ph.D., Senior Editor
Look around. The pace of technological change in the 21st century is unprecedented. It would have been hard to imagine the early 2000’s what life would be like in 2020, prior to widespread internet access and smartphone technology. Moreover, UN project s world population to reach 8.5 billion by the year 2030 due to growth in developing countries and megacities; food and clean water will be in great demand. This issue, therefore, is to explore two technologies that affect lives in billions.
THE SIXTH GENERATION (6G)
By 2030, a new cellular network standard has emerged that offers even great speed than 5G. Early research on this sixth generation (6G) has started during the late 2010s when China, USA, and other countries investigated the potential for working at higher frequencies.
Whereas the first four mobile generations tended to operate at between several hundred or several thousand megahertz, 5G has expanded this range into the ten of thousands. A revolutionary technology at the time, it allowed vastly improved band width and lower latency. However, it was not without its problems, as exponentially growing demand for wireless data transfer put ever-increasing pressure on service providers, while even shorter latencies were required for certain specialist and emerging applications.
This led to development of 6G, based on frequencies ranging from 100 GHz to 1 THz and beyond. A ten-fold boost in data transfer rates would mean users enjoying terabits per second (Tbit/s). Furthermore, improved network stability and latency – achieved with AI and machine learning algorithms – could be combined with even greater geographical coverage. The Internet of Things, already well-established during the 2020s, now had the potential to grow by further orders of magnitude and connect not billions, but trillions of objects.
Source: Huang, T., Yang, W., Wu, J., Ma, J., Zhang, X., & Zhang, D. (2019). A Survey on Green 6G Network: Architecture and Technologies. IEEE Access, 7, 175758-175768.
Following a decade of research and testing, widespread adoption of 6G occurs in the 2030s. However, wireless telecommunications are now reaching plateau in terms of progress, as it becomes extremely difficult to extend beyond the terahertz range. These limits are eventually overcome, but require wholly new approaches and fundamental breakthroughs in physics. The idea of seventh stand (7G) is also placed in doubt by making future advances iterative, rather than generational.
DESALINATION
A combination of increasing severe droughts, aging infrastructure and the depletion of underground aquifers is now endangering millions of people around the world. The on-going population growth is only exacerbating this, with global freshwater supplies continually stretched to their limits. This is forcing a rapid expansion of desalination technology
Source: UN Environment Program
This idea o f removing salt from saline water had been described as early as 320 BC. In the late 1700s it was used by the US Navy, with solar still built into shipboard stoves. It was not until the 20th century, however, that industrial-scale desalination began to emerge, with multi-flash distillation and reverse osmosis membranes. Waste heat from fossil fuel or nuclear power plants could be used, but even then, these processes remained prohibitively expensive, inefficient and highly energy-intensive.
The world was adding an extra 80 million people each year, equivalent to the entire population of Germany. By the early 21th century, the world’s demand for resources was growing exponentially. The UN estimated that humanity would require over 30 percent more water between 2012 and 2030. Historical improvements in freshwater production efficiency were no longer able to keep pace with a ballooning population, made worse by the effects of climate change.