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Finding the X factor

Looking at the world today, and comparing it to what it was 20 years ago, it’s often astounding at how far we've come technologically. Even 10 years ago, the mobile phone was only just making headway, and touch-screen tablets and smartphones were still a long way off becoming mainstream. By any stretch of the imagination, we live in the science fiction of barely two decades ago. But, given how far we've come, what would it take for us to reach the realms of today's science fiction?

According to the people behind the X-Prize Foundation, the initiative that offers huge cash prizes to scientists and inventors who can push the limits of what is technologically possible, all it takes is a little monetary incentive. The first X-Prize was won in 2004, when the $10 million Ansari X-Prize was awarded to Scaled Composites for the creation of the SpaceShipOne craft.

The craft kick started the private space tourism industry, and became the basis for the craft being used by Virgin Galactic. Since then, an entire industry of private space companies has emerged, offering services that couldn't have been dreamt of even 10 years ago, when space travel was the preserve of governmental agencies such as Nasa.

At the time, the foundation challenged teams to create a working spacecraft that could carry three people into space, twice in two weeks. And this is how SpaceShipOne was born. Indeed, many of the X-Prize's competitions focus on specific problems, offering large cash sums to anyone who can find feasible solutions. And it is often small teams that come up with the goods.

"Small teams of individuals are now empowered by the use of various, very powerful, exponential technologies to do what only large corporations and governments could do before," Dr Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X-Prize Foundation, recently told the BBC. "We're living in a day and age where, literally, a small team of people can touch and positively affect the lives of a billion people."

Small teams of people also tend to react well to specific challenges, particularly when such large amounts of money are up for grabs. After all, a large corporation wouldn’t bat an eyelid at the prospect of $10 million, whereas it could be the making of a small team of experts.

In recent years, the X-Prize has also turned itself toward environmental issues, and in 2010, launched a $1.4 million oil clean-up challenge, having witnessed what the foundation called "clumsy" clean-up techniques in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The winning team, Team Elastec/American Marine, from Illinois, USA, demonstrated that they could recover 4,670 gallons of oil per minute, recovering 89.5 per cent of oil from the water.

The foundation also looks to wildly more futuristic challenges. For example, Diamandis recently launched a challenge to create a Star Trek-style medical "tricorder", which, if completed, woulc come with a $10 million prize. The device first came to fame in 1966, when the Star Trek doctor used it to diagnose illnesses simply by scanning a person's body. Indeed, without it, the Enterprise crew would have seen much more trouble than they bargained for.

The Qualcomm Tricorder X-Prize, as it is known, says that researchers should build a tool capable of detecting "key health metrics and diagnosing a set of 15 diseases", and must be no heavier than 2.2 kilograms. Should a winner come through, it would no doubt transform the medical industry, though organisers admit that it could be a long time before anything comes up.

Either way, offering large cash prizes in exchange for doing the impossible is what the X-Prize is all about, and it certainly shows the potential of small, dedicated teams. After all, according to Diamandis, "The rate at which innovation is occurring, that breakthroughs are coming online, is growing extraordinarily. We've entered an era where you can say to people, "Stop complaining, and start solving.""

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