As a futurist, I look at long term trends and waves of history.  The three waves of history we know have been the Agricultural Age, the Industrial Age and the Information Age.  The first age began some 10,000 years ago when man first began to literally put down roots.  The second age began some 250 years ago with the invention of the steam engine.  The third age began some 30 years ago with communications satellites, computers, the explosive growth of the white collar work force and the birth of the electronic global village envisioned by Marshall McLuhan.

We are now entering a new age, the Shift Age.  In the months ahead I will write in some detail about this age because – shameless plug here – it is a name I have coined and is also the title of my book that will be published in the first quarter of 2008.  For this column however I will focus on just one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Shift Age.  The Shift Age marks humanity’s last, at least on this planet, stage of evolution, the global stage.  Humanity has ultimately and finally entered this global stage and there is no turning back.

In 1974, around the beginning of the Information Age, humanity reached 4 billion in number.  We are now at 6.7 billion which means that our species has grown 66% in the last 33 years, an astonishing fact.  This is one of the two primary drivers of global warming, the shear growth …

 Last week Google announced that the company, and its philanthropic subsidiary, Google.org, would explore research and develop renewable energy.  The goal is to ultimately produce one gigawatt of renewable energy and do so more cheaply that coal-generated electricity, which of course creates vast amounts of CO2.  I was thrilled to read the news reports of this announcement.

As someone who thinks about the future, converting global society to alternative and renewable types of energy and away from fossil fuels is perhaps the top challenge humanity faces.  The way this will get done is through creativity, innovation, technological breakthroughs and non-attachment to existing status quos. Sounds like something that Google is well prepared to do.  (Regular readers know that I have admired Google in the past; click on ‘Google’ in the archives at right).

Of course the traditional reaction to this announcement, mostly from those supposedly insightful “Wall Street Analysts” was to suggest the company was risking corporate focus on its’ core businesses.  Nonsense!  It was these types of conventional pundits that, a century ago suggested that the railroad companies were in the railroad and not transportation businesses.  Flying people in airplanes, nah, you guys are in the train business.  Using all your right of way real estate for development?  Nah, stick to the train business.

As readers of this column know, I have often …

Google has now made the long awaited announcement that it would be entering the wireless arena.  It was not a product, or “Google Phone” roll-out, but rather the announcement of OHA, or the Open Handset Alliance.  OHA(my choice to come up with an acronym as the full name sounds a bit too bureaucratic and almost Orwellian for me to type it a lot) is the next step in the globalization of connectivity and something I have anticipated and expected for a couple of years.

On this blog, and at conferences I point to the fact that it is the cell phone that is the true global technology. I have written about the explosive growth and sheer numbers of devices, of the technological innovation and how the cell phone has found a seat at the table of major media.  OHA takes the logical next step which is to break up the walled gardens of carriers and software suppliers.  Incompatibility is at odds with a world of  ever increasing connectedness.  Universality is one of the touch stones of our wireless future.  Another is the ongoing commoditization of the entire business pushing costs ever lower for the consumer.  OHA will facilitate both of these inevitable trends.

Google of course is doing this for business reasons.  They hope to dominate the mobile advertising marketplace the way they currently dominate the on-line one.  In addition, they seem to have a strong desire to attack the business constructs of Microsoft and other companies that sell …

The impact that humanity is having on climate change is directly related to the fact that there are so many of us. Add on top of our shear numbers the fact that we treat the planet harshly and it is clear why we are moving toward a global crisis.

Consider some facts about the growth of human population. Humans have been on the planet for hundreds of thousands of years. It took until 1804 for our numbers to reach 1 billion. It took another 123 years to reach 2 billion in 1927. It only took another 33 years for us to reach 3 billion in 1960 and 14 years to reach 4 billion in 1974. That means that if you are older that 40 the world’s population has doubled in your lifetime. There are now 6.6 times more of us now than 200 hundred years ago. It is also during these 200 hundred years that the Industrial Revolution occurred, bringing with it the use of fossil fuels for powering our societies and economies.

It is not clear, and has been open to debate as to what the “natural” or “perfect” level of human population is for the earth. What is the global number that could be sustained indefinitely in a perfect and interrelated manner on Earth? There is no correct answer to that question. It is clear that a few hundred million of us living lives of hunters and gatherers …