Sex robots!
I’d really like to at least see humanity fully switch to clean energy in my lifetime but I’m losing hope.
I should already be able to take a self-driving flying taxi to work. I should already be able to vacation on the moon. We shouldn’t be burning stuff to power all our modern tech.
I grew up on 80s/90s scifi. I hope humanity can get it’s shit together and that the current anti-intellectualism phase we’re in is just part of a larger cycle.
Flying taxis won’t happen, way too many risks, even in the future, never mind the horrors of having your skies full of that crap.
We have auto-pilots for planes, those are mostly fine. People are the problem. I dont trust humans to operate motor vehicles in 2 dimensions, let alone 3…
I don’t think auto pilot works how you seem to think it does…
Obviously I know how they work, I saw it in a documentary about Airplanes. The Otto pilot inflates at the press of a button (or is inflated manually) and they fly the plane.
A lot of black mirror stuff.
Apologies for the blanket pessimism but the last decades darkened my view.
Exoskeletons like Ripley’s in Alien. We’ve got smaller ones, but I want to pilot a walking fork lift.
Pipe dream - battlemechs aka mechwarrior (not pacific rim). Very impractical but I want one anyway. Yes, I saw the robot fighting league by Megabots. I have their poster.
I’ve seen prototypes of these that were very impressive since like a decade ago, so I’m fully expecting those to be here soon. Power supply usually is the biggest issue
living in a self-sustaining ecological-aware community that values freedom and diversity and everyone having their needs met
I saw something about a city in India being super eco-friendly. I’m not sure what was the name of the city, but it looks like they have a few.
Vaccines. Maybe in 100 years we’ll even be able to eliminate measles…again.
We currently carry tricorders in our pockets. I can see a medical tricorder being ubiquitous for field medics, ships, and the like within 100 years.
Fast-refresh ePaper. I just want a laptop I can use outside, man!
They exist as monitors. In videos they kind of look like really early crappy LCD screens.
I’d just sit in the shade.
Look up Daylight DC-1 might be what you are looking for
Oooohhh, thank you
I remember we could use the game boy advance SP outside. Is this screen technology used for PC?
Tricorders, cellphones are already partway there they just need more durable, small sensors like a handheld light spectrometer to tell what things are made of and a handheld interferometer to detect gravity
Check out the app Phyphox, it uses all your existing sensors and probably surpasses tricorders in several ways while, of course, lacking in a few others.
I can detect gravity without a device:
Jump off a roof. If you hit the ground, you’ve detected gravity.
You could just raise your arm and let it loose…
external gestation…a womb with a view
severe genetic manipulation… designer babies
digit/limb/organ regeneration
They just released a story about removing the gene that causes down syndrome. Pretty huge
Seems entirely reasonable that a Gattaca future is achievable. Whether desirable is the other question. Somewhere CJ Cherryh is being worshipped as a prophet.
Artificial wombs are something that’s often presented as dystopian, but I would imagine would actually be a very good thing. Beyond the obvious help it would be to infertile couples that desired children, they would if commonly adopted eliminate the danger of birth and pregnancy complications, and discomfort associated with the process. Probably not everyone would want to use it, but I’d bet even having the option would mean a lot to a lot of people.
The real downside to artificial wombs is that we may rapidly become dependent on them. Half of pregnancies result in spontaneous abortion. With external gestation that assumedly wouldn’t happen. That’s a hell of a lot of evolutionary pressure which could have all kinds of consequences.
And then all of this gave birth to the terrorists known as the Naturalists™…
Asteroid mining. We’ve had the tech to get people to the asterodi for decades, just lack the will to do it.
Okay I’ve had this astroid mining concept dining around my empty skull for a while now. The way I see it is that going up to space and mining an astroid for minerals and then bringing them back down to earth will never be a worthwhile endeavour. If you’re mining them in space and using the material manufacturing in space then that seems more plausible. The only way I can think of planetary based astroid mining being worthwhile is if instead of mining the rock and sending it down in crafts, you just bump the astroid so it’s on a collision course with earth and then mine whatever is left from impact. In anycase, I’d say we are far off being able to mine asteroids since imo, the only worthwhile way to do it is by having the entire process in space. And we’re not even close to that level of infrastructure existing in space.
https://bookshop.org/beta-search?keywords=asteroid+mining
Here’s a link to some books on the subject. You’re right, most people figure it would be putting our heavy industries in space and bring down what ever products are needed.
We can get a major shot in the arm if we can find a solid industrial use for iridium that sufficiently eclipses any other element. Or some alloy to the same effect.
Unfortunately, it’s so rare that it’s next to impossible to do any real amount of testing.
Artificial stem cells seem like the next thing to really revolutionize medicine.
Quantum computers for brute force hacks seems doable in 100.
Eye tracking pointer devices will likely be more convenient than mice within a dozen or two years. This will probably be widely available for people who are paralyzed first.
Diamond processors are always 10 years away, but I think we can do it in 100. This would revolutionize the amount of power we can put through a chip without worrying about cooling.
Quick charge capacitor replacements for standard rechargble batteries
Low yield fusion plants. I’d like to think of them as capable of high yield, but it’s much harder than initially thought. Some ideas are quite promising for low yield.
The eye tracking stuff exists already. There are medical device companies that build and sell these things.
I feel like the bottleneck will be with smooth continuous motions. It’s very easy to move a cursor in that way with a mouse but you can’t do that motion with your eyes unless you are looking at something else that’s moving.
Fair. Check this out. The existing stuff is pretty cool https://youtu.be/CP3t8qMHcsM
Suicide Machines on Street Corners.
That’d be pretty expensive to run if you think anout it. And who’d do the cleanup?
Blend them up and flush them into the sewage system.
🤮
I read that as Sucide Marines and was confused for a bit
They already have them that you can carry in your pocket.
Yeah but they make such a mess.
I suspect we will see a human brain to digital interface. I don’t think it will be “downloading minds” or anything, but I could see someone finding a way to plug a specialized camera or mic in to have a full functioning robotic replacement part.
I’m pretty sure they already have the beginning pieces to this, but its too specialized and expensive to do anything commercial with it yet.
This is so terrifying to me. I feel like it’ll end up like the Black Mirror episode with the subscription model, getting more and more expensive with fewer features.
Common People
That episode made my wife and I really hope this tech never becomes a thing.
Cochlear implants are a form of this, and are already commercial. I remember having a conversation with a guy at a doof about 10 years ago, standing right near a loud sound system, and it took me 20 minutes to realise he had one. He was completely deaf without it on… I can only assume the tech is much better these days.
Similar things exist for vision (though maybe not yet commercial?).
bsg, sga all had the brain interface thing going on. especially the cylon part was all about that.
Nuclear fusion seems increasingly achievable.
They are down to 2 main problems now. The main one is (the cost of) scaling up. Fusion reactors will be more effective then bigger they are. The tiny test ones are already past break even.
The other is wall material. Apparently the radiation has an annoying ability to transmute the elements making up the wall of the reactor. They are working out a material that can maintain its bulk mechanical properties, even with random elements appearing in its internal structure.
The only one I heard news about breaking even was that thing that shot a lot of lasers to a pellet. For a fraction of a second It broke even or produced slightly more than they poured in, but it was much less of what they spent.
There’s been something else new?
I saw a talk on the subject about a year back. It was discussing tokamak reactors, from an engineer working on them. The small ones can’t sustain a break even state, but they are affected by the inverse square law to a larger degree. I believe China is about to start/has started construction on a power station sized test reactor.
The pellet sort are a different type. They have different pros and cons.
