DEMOS

According to Time Magazine:
More than money, more than politics, ideas are the secret power that this planet runs on. So what are their ten big ideas...

Here are four  to get your mind going...

1. Common Wealth - The 21st century will overturn many of our basic assumptions about economic life. The 20th century saw the end of European dominance of global politics and economics. The 21st century will see the end of American dominance too, as new powers, including China, India and Brazil, continue to grow and make their voices heard on the world stage. Yet the century's changes will be even deeper than a rebalancing of economics and geopolitics. The challenges of sustainable development—protecting the environment, stabilizing the world's population, narrowing the gaps of rich and poor and ending extreme poverty—will render passé the very idea of competing nation-states that scramble for markets, power and resources.

2. The End of Customer Service Technology and public sentiment are aligning to truly shift the responsibility of collecting goods and services to the consumer. Consider the last time you rang up your own purchase at Wal-Mart, checked into a hotel at a kiosk or bought a ticket from a machine in the lobby of a movie theater. Companies love self-service for the money it saves, and with consumers finally playing along, the need to interact with human beings is quickly disappearing.

3. Reverse Radicalism  Serious study of terrorism has, for the past 20 years, been fixated on one question. That question, so teasingly close to the right one, is, Why do people join terrorist groups? The better the study, the more muddled the findings. Would-be terrorists are "unremarkable people" living "unremarkable lives," concluded a 2007 report by the New York City police department. Humans do not join terrorist groups because they are poor, oppressed or religious. They seem to join in search of purpose, excitement or status. They seem to be fighting loneliness. But then again, not always. The smarter question, the one experts have now begun to ask, is, Why do people leave terrorist groups? John Horgan, a Penn State psychologist, has interviewed 28 former terrorists. His subjects have spanned 13 organizations, including five Islamic extremist groups. The men have told him strikingly similar stories of disenchantment. "I was stunned by the common denominators between members of the ira and members of Jemaah Islamiah [a militant Islamist group in Southeast Asia with ties to al-Qaeda]."

4. Geoengineering For most environmentalists, the answer to that depressing litany is to keep pushing the same message harder: cut carbon and cut it now. But a few scientists are beginning to quietly raise the possibility of cooling the planet's fever directly through geoengineering. The principle behind it is straightforward — compensate for an intensified greenhouse effect by reducing the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth — but the techniques seem like pure science fiction. Just a few: using orbital mirrors to bounce sunlight back into space, fertilizing the oceans with iron to amplify their ability to absorb carbon and even painting roofs white to increase solar reflection.

Geoengineering has long been the province of kooks, but as the difficulty of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions has become harder to ignore, it is slowly emerging as an option of last resort. The tipping point came in 2006, when the Nobel Prize—winning atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen published an editorial examining the possibility of releasing vast amounts of sulfurous debris into the atmosphere to create a haze that would keep the planet cool. "Over the past couple of years, it's gone from an outsider thing to something that is increasingly discussed," says Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University.