what do we know about the future? difficult question,simple answer: nothing. we cannot predict the future. we only can create a visionof the future, how it might be, a vision which reveals disruptiveideas, which is inspiring,
major players in 3d printing, and this is the most important reason which breaks the chainsof common thinking. there are a lot of people who created their own visionabout the future,
for instance, this vision herefrom the early 20th century. it says here that thisis the ocean plane of the future. it takes only one and a half daysto cross the atlantic ocean. today, we know that this futurevision didn't come true. so this is our largestairplane which we have, the airbus a380, and it's quite huge, so a lot of people fit in there and it's technically completely different than the vision i've shown to you.
i'm working in a team with airbus, and we have created our vision about a more sustainablefuture of aviation. so sustainability is quiteimportant for us, which should incorporate social but as well as environmentaland economic values. so we have created a verydisruptive structure which mimics the designof bone, or a skeleton, which occurs in nature.
so that's why it looksmaybe a little bit weird, especially to the people who dealwith structures in general. but at least it's just a kind of artwork to explore our ideasabout a different future. what are the main customers of the future? so, we have the old, we have the young, we have the uprising power of women, and there's one mega-trendwhich affects all of us. these are the future anthropometrics.
so our children are gettinglarger, but at the same time we are growing into different directions. so what we need is spaceinside the aircraft, inside a very dense area. these people have different needs. so we see a clear needof active health promotion, especially in the case of the old people. we want to be treated as individuals. we like to be productivethroughout the entire travel chain,
and what we are doing in the future is we want to use the latestman-machine interface, and we want to integrate thisand show this in one product. so we combined these needswith technology's themes. so for instance, we are asking ourselves, how can we create more light? how can we bring more naturallight into the airplane? so this airplane has nowindows anymore, for example. what about the dataand communication software
which we need in the future? my belief is that the airplaneof the future will get its own consciousness. it will be more like a living organism than just a collectionof very complex technology. this will be very different in the future. it will communicate directly with the passenger in its environment. and then we are talkingalso about materials,
synthetic biology, for example. and my belief is that we will getmore and more new materials which we canput into structure later on, because structure is one of the keyissues in aircraft design. so let's compare the oldworld with the new world. i just want to show you herewhat we are doing today. so this is a bracket of an a380crew rest compartment. it takes a lot of weight, and it follows the classical design rules.
this here is an equal bracketfor the same purpose. it follows the design of bone. the design processis completely different. at the one hand, we have 1.2 kilos, and at the other hand 0.6 kilos. so this technology, 3dprinting, and new design rules really help us to reduce the weight, which is the biggest issuein aircraft design, because it's directly linkedto greenhouse gas emissions.
push this idea a little bit forward. so how does nature build itscomponents and structures? so nature is very clever.it puts all the information into these small buildingblocks, which we call dna. and nature builds largeskeletons out of it. so we see a bottom-up approach here, because all the information,as i said, are inside the dna. and this is combinedwith a top-down approach, because what we are doingin our daily life
is we train our muscles,we train our skeleton, and it's getting stronger. and the same approach can beapplied to technology as well. so our building block is carbonnanotubes, for example, to create a large, rivet-lessskeleton at the end of the day. how this looks in particular,you can show it here. so imagine you havecarbon nanotubes growing inside a 3d printer, and they are embeddedinside a matrix of plastic,
and follow the forceswhich occur in your component. and you've got trillions of them. so you really align them to wood, and you take this wood and makemorphological optimization, so you make structures, sub-structures, which allows you to transmitelectrical energy or data. and now we take thismaterial, combine this with a top-down approach, and build bigger and bigger components.
so how might the airplaneof the future look? so we have very differentseats which adapt to the shape of the future passenger, with the different anthropometrics. we have social areas inside the aircraft which might turn into a place where you can play virtual golf. and finally, this bionic structure, which is covered by a transparent
biopolymer membrane,will really change radically how we look at aircrafts in the future.
so as jason silva said, if we can imagine it, why not make it so? see you in the future. thank you. (applause)
