Discovery Channel - Building the Future (2010)

Building the Future is a landmark series from the Discovery Channel about humankind's phenomenal ingenuity in engineering and shaping the world around us. Each program focuses on a simple human need — shelter or water, energy or safety — and explores how that basic requirement has led to some of the most incredible, awe-inspiring achievements of our species. We will take the viewer on journeys around the globe to see the projects that seem to defy the laws of physics or constraints of climate. And we will move through time to marvel at what was achieved centuries, even millennia, ago by our ancestors. However epic the scale of construction, however mind-boggling the technological statistics, humans are the heart. We will see every project through a personal lens — an archaeologist uncovering an ancient wonder, an engineer grappling with present-day problems and dangers, a designer dreaming of the future. And we will never forget that nature has a habit of fighting back — the possibility of failure is always present, and the higher we build, the harder we fall. This is not just a story of success … Our planet has often brutally let us know that we have overstepped the mark.

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Part 1: The Energy Solution
With world energy consumption forecast to grow 57 percent by 2025, it is predicted that all of our major fossil fuels will be exhausted in less than 200 years. Building the Future: The Energy Solution reveals how, in a race against time, we are planning, building and searching for remarkable new energy solutions to safeguard our future.


Part 2: 21st Century Shelter
The United Nations estimates that by 2050, there will be 3.3 billion households on the planet — nearly 2 billion more than present , and a construction rate of over 66 houses per minute for 50 years. Not only will we need more shelter, but as the climate changes and space and natural resources run low, the structures in which we exist must protect us from even greater extremes and be environmentally sustainable. Building the Future: 21st-Century Shelter reveals how in a shrinking, changing world we are finding ways to build and create extraordinary structures to live and work in.


Part 3: Surviving Climate Change
At the start of the 21st century our ambition seems only matched by our ability to engineer the world around us. But our very success is putting us on a collision course with the forces of nature. Now, as we pump billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, we are potentially creating the most lethal man-made natural disaster in history. Global warming may be the greatest threat to our future survival. Building the Future: Surviving Climate Change reveals humankind’s remarkable ability to fight back and how now, more than ever, our engineering ingenuity must provide the answers to our most basic need – protection and safety from the deadly extremes of nature.


Part 4: The Quest for Water
In the 21st century the demands on the earth’s water supplies have reached critical levels. In 2002, the world consumed 3 trillion gallons of freshwater every day, a sevenfold increase, and more than doubled the increase in population, in less than a century. The pressures of overpopulation, poor management and climate change are pushing our water reserves to — and beyond — their limits. Building the Future: The Quest for Water travels the world to reveal the remarkable ways we harness water from both past and present and how perhaps, more than any other, we must find new ways to protect and develop this vital natural resource if we are to survive the future.







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