How Neal Stephenson's 20-Kilometer Space Tower Could Change Everything. You Can't Run From the Cop Car of the Future. Nanoscale Microwave Transmitters Will Transform Your Phone. 3 Ideas That Are Pushing the Edge of Science | Gadgets. 1 Sperm-powered Nanobots The next wave in health care may include a brigade of medical nanobots, devices tiny enough to ride the flow of blood through the body's arteries to a problem area.
The bots might arrive at a clot, for example, and then using an internal power system, obliterate the clot with a precisely targeted drug or therapy. Designing a power source to accomplish such a task has been a challenge, but from the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University comes a possible answer. The same molecular power packs that fuel sperm in their journey through the uterus and to a fallopian tube might be copied and used to keep the nanomachines running once they reach their targets. Led by reproductive biologist Alex Travis, the engineering effort focuses on a chain of enzymes that metabolize glucose molecules into the biological fuel ATP (a process known as glycolysis), which enables sperm locomotion. Does this mean we could actually experience a second dimension of time?
Displays Might One Day Be Made of Just Air and Water. 10 Future Public Transportation Vehicles. Cities of the future. 2512. Parameters: I'm going to assume no alien invasions or total collapses of technological civilization or significant asteroid impacts, because all three of these are rare in the historical record. I'm also going to ignore space colonization, because I want to focus on this planet. I'm going to assume that we are sufficiently short-sighted and stupid that we keep burning fossil fuels. We're going to add at least 1000 GT of fossil carbon to the atmosphere, and while I don't expect us to binge all the way through the remaining 4000 GT of accessible reserves, we may get through another 1000 GT. So the climate is going to be rather ... different. Sea levels will have risen by at least one, and possibly more than ten metres worldwide.
Energy and technology: I think there's a high probability (approaching certainty) that we'll be running on a de-carbonized energy cycle by then. Fusion: will be in widespread use, or proven to be economically non-viable. Political/demographic change ... Raccoon laborers and plants designed for climate change: Charles Stross' Predictions for 2512. You have to take that whole "predicting the future" business with a whopping grain of salt, as per definition no one can do that, only make educated guesses or dream. Generally I trust scientist and other experts (climatologists, economists like Krugmann) if they act in their area of expertise and do the former. With fictioneers you have the problem that they could tell you the most biased garbage and make it sound like gold just as well.
Stross appears to be quite reasonable in the fields of aerospace engineering, finances and geopolitics, but he has something of a techno-triumphalist streak wrt. his infatuation with nuclear power and 3D printing and sometimes you can't quite tell where his polemics end or start. Stephenson... oh boy... He kinda lost it once he started with the whole "innovation starvation" thing. Japan Will Have a Space Elevator by 2050. The best visuals to explain the Singularity to senior executives. Tomorrow morning I’m doing a presentation to the top executive team of a very large organization on the next 20 years. Most of what I will cover will be general societal, business and technological drivers as well as specific strategic issues driving their business. However as part of stretching their thinking I’ll also speak a about the Singularity. As such I’ve been trying to find one good image to introduce my explanation, however I haven’t been able to find one which is quite right for the purpose.
Ray Kurzweil’s Six Epochs diagram below is great and the one I’ll probably end up using, however it is a bit too over-the-top for most senior executives. The Universe becoming conscious is beyond the ambit of most strategy sessions. Source: Ray Kurzweil, Applied Abstractions The chart below from Hans Moravec showing how exponential growth of computing power will allow machines to match human intellectual capabilities is excellent, but it is seriously out of date.
Vernor Vinge on the Singularity. Vernor Vinge Department of Mathematical Sciences San Diego State University (c) 1993 by Vernor Vinge (This article may be reproduced for noncommercial purposes if it is copied in its entirety, including this notice.) The original version of this article was presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993. A slightly changed version appeared in the Winter 1993 issue of Whole Earth Review. Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended. Is such progress avoidable? If not to be avoided, can events be guided so that we may survive? What is The Singularity? The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century. There may be developed computers that are "awake" and superhumanly intelligent.
The first three possibilities depend in large part on improvements in computer hardware. . [8] Drexler, K. 23 incredible new technologies you’ll see by 2021. 10 Structures That Could Help Us Build Civilizations on the Ocean. Imagining the Super-Enhanced Athlete of the Future. 9 Overlooked Technologies That Could Transform The World. What I've noticed is that most people don't really pay attention to "science" news, unless it's something that they can see immediately. I think this is at least partially because of the amount of news that comes out daily - whatever we may think about the quality of news, there is just a flood of it, which makes picking out "interesting" items difficult.
When I talk about (just for example) the idea of gene therapy, most people think that it is still complete science fiction, as opposed to a very near-term product that will be available. Of course, CSP has been around for years, so it isn't really "new" to the average person. What they don't realize is the way that efficiencies have improved... And electronic currency is still in the "only oddballs use it" phase - people are aware of it, but mostly because of the issues bitcoin has had in the recent past.
Finally, of course, for a majority of people, the only science fiction they think of it Star Wars/Trek, or (advanced!) Planetary Alchemy by Alan Smale. Let’s fix Mars. Of course, the Red Planet is spectacular just as it is. Images from forty years of Mars missions have revealed its stark beauty and rose-tinted rocky grandeur. In its southern hemisphere Mars has ancient cratered highlands similar to the Moon’s, while much of the north consists of plains lower in altitude and geologically much younger. The giant shield volcano of Olympus Mons rises 24 km, three times as high as Everest, above the surrounding plains. Valles Marineris, a huge scar across the face of the planet, is a system of canyons 4,000 kilometers long, ten times the length of the Grand Canyon. Other canyons, networks of river valleys, stream beds, gullies, channels, layered deposits, deltas and alluvial fans provide strong evidence for flowing water, crater lakes and salty seas in a much warmer and wetter period of Mars’s history.
There’s a lot to like about Mars. Some time in the future we might decide we need that dusty red real estate. Down to basics. Fixing Mars. Floating Cities of the Future. Will food shortages force us to become vegetarians? Future - Science & Environment - Global resources stock check. If we fail to correct current consumption trends, then when will our most valuable natural resources run out? As the world’s population soars, so does its consumption, and as a result we are stretching many of our natural resources to their limits. Of course, the assumption is that human ingenuity and market forces will prevent supplies from running out: we could create better or cheaper extraction methods, recycle materials, find alternatives to non-renewable sources, or reduce consumption. The hope is that talks at the Rio+20 Earth summit will help to steer the world economy on a more sustainable path. But the clock is already ticking, and if the unthinkable happens and we fail to correct current trends, then when can we expect our most valuable resources to run out?
If you want to see the data we used to construct this infographic, you can find it here [PDF]. Who should pay when your robot breaks the law? Since it's inevitable I'll take the bullet and bring up Asimov's three laws of robotics: 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws. Asimov later added a "zeroth" law: 0. Ike was horrified when people started talking about applying his three laws to real robots.
The Singularity is not coming - Cognitive Social Web - A better web, for a better world. Sorry ‘Prometheus’ fans: No interstellar travel for five more centuries. When do we get one? (AP) Possibly not. A fascinating recent research paper by Marc G. Millis, a former NASA expert on breakthrough propulsion, suggests that we probably won’t be ready to travel to other stars for at least another two to five centuries. How does he figure? Because, he argues, even if we do invent faster, niftier spaceships, there may not be enough energy available to reach other stars anytime soon.
Here’s Millis’s reasoning: Imagine we merely wanted to launch a small, 11-ton probe that took 75 years to get to our closest star, Alpha Centauri. And humans don’t exactly have that energy just lying around. The good news, Millis notes, is that we could probably have a small colony ship that contained a bunch of humans ready even sooner, by the year 2200 or so. Below is a graph showing how soon different future spaceships might arrive depending on how fast the world’s energy supply grows.
Millis, who’s now at the Tau Zero Foundation, also raises an interesting paradox. 10 of the Weirdest Futurist Scenarios for the Evolution of Humanity. Curious to know which of these visions you feel is the most and least plausible. I've got to hand it to you, Mr. Dvorsky. A lot of those ideas are pretty hair-brained, but you were able to weave an article from them anyhow. I would have given up at five, perhaps, although I'm glad you mentioned the likes of the VHEMT and others. It was a fun read.
However, I take exception to a couple items in your piece. First off, I would say that the future will hold some combination of "all of the above", with no one particular hypothesis prevailing in the next few hundred years as each hypothesized outcome exploits a unique ecological niche. That said, brain size is DEFINITELY correlated with intelligence. The reason Americans' heads are getting bigger may be due to the high rate of C-sections in the US. I actually agree with you about speciation. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Heh, that actually occurred to me, too. Glad to hear it! Why the Last People on Earth Will Eat Sugar Cane and Corn.
It Is Almost Impossible To Create Fake Meat. The Easiest, Most Horrifying Way to Create Artificial Wombs. Abortion. ultimately, i feel like this is how the issue of abortion will be resolved. first, a couple of ground rule, undeniable facts: 1. we do not know when human life worthy of protection - i.e. "personhood" - begins. 2. it is IMPOSSIBLE to know with certainty when "personhood" begins. it will forever be the fodder for philosophical musings and never one of absolute certainty. ultimately, as it manifests in government and societies, it is a matter of pragmatism and the freedom of one party who is undeniably a person with rights - women. as with all rational people, i am pro choice. i do not believe that the 8 cells of a blastocyst are a "person" with a life worth protecting. but at the same time, what of a fetus that 8.5 months old still within the womb of its mother and yet to be born but could easily survive even without an incubator. just as i would instantly dismiss the blastocyst as human in any significant way, i would say an 8.5 month fetus is a human child. not even a iota of doubt.
China to create largest mega city in the world with 42 million people. Future Society & Enviroment. When will computer hardware match the human brain? by Hans Moravec. Journal of Evolution and Technology. 1998. Vol. 1 When will computer hardware match the human brain? (Received Dec. 1997) Hans Moravec ABSTRACT This paper describes how the performance of AI machines tends to improve at the same pace that AI researchers get access to faster hardware. The processing power and memory capacity necessary to match general intellectual performance of the human brain are estimated. Brains, Eyes and Machines Computers have far to go to match human strengths, and our estimates will depend on analogy and extrapolation. There are considerations other than sheer scale. More computer power is needed to reach human performance, but how much? The retina is a transparent, paper-thin layer of nerve tissue at the back of the eyeball on which the eye's lens projects an image of the world.
The 1,500 cubic centimeter human brain is about 100,000 times as large as the retina, suggesting that matching overall human behavior will take about 100 million MIPS of computer power. M.guardian.co.uk. As mission statements go, it takes some beating. Scrawled on a whiteboard are the words: "We will change how the Earth looks from space! " It surpasses "Don't be evil" (the motto of Google, just down the road), and in terms of hubris it trumps even that of Facebook (also just round the corner): "Move fast and break things! " In this anonymous laboratory on a low-rise industrial estate in Menlo Park, 40km south of San Francisco, there is a whiff of revolution in the air. There is a whiff of madness, too, but after a few hours in the company of the man leading this intriguing Silicon Valley startup, one begins to wonder if it is the rest of the world that is insane.
Professor Patrick Brown could easily be taken for a deranged visionary. He is intense, driven and unfazed by critics and rivals. The fake meat business has been around for decades, of course, but it has never really taken off. 'I have zero interest in making a new food for vegans,’ says molecular biologist Patrick Brown.
"Sure. " The Future of Graveyards. I am a taphophile, and have been one since birth. It saddens me to think that cemeteries might no longer be the places that I've come to love and the wonderful places in which I enjoy spending my time. I spent many, many hours as a teenager and in my 20's, peacefully roaming around the cemeteries of New England; often I would just find a comfortable spot and read. There's something about the tangibleness of the old tombstones and crypts that speaks to me, and that I find very personally important; I touch them and for a moment I'm connected to those people, wondering what they might have been like, wondering what their lives, their families, their deaths were like.
That connection I feel to history is part and parcel of my personal makeup. And the epitaphs! And occasionally you'll find mysteries, there, too. Fortunately for me, I come from old New England stock and we have our own family burial plot out in the woods in northern New Hampshire. If We Ever Become Superhuman Cyborgs, This Is How It'll Happen. Dear Science Fiction Writers: Stop Being So Pessimistic! Apprehending the Future: Emerging Technologies, from Science Fiction to Campus Reality (EDUCAUSE Review. The Wrong Way to Plan for the Future. Wired 14.05: The RFID Hacking Underground. A Chart that Reveals How Science Fiction Futures Changed Over Time. This Is Lunarcrete, a Building Block for Moon Colonies. The High Frontier, Redux. Welcome to the Orion's Arm Universe Project. The myth of the starship. Why Star Trek's Vision of the Future is Out of Date. The 8 Most Common Sci-Fi Visions of the Future (And Why They'll Never Happen)
Optimistic Visions of the World After the Oil Runs Out. The Day Your Car Kidnaps You. How would robotic prostitutes change the sex tourism industry? 10 Futuristic Places to Shop. Why you'll never go to space prison. The Dark Future of Phone Jamming. San Francisco Archipelago « Burrito Justice. What San Francisco Would Look Like After Climate Change. The 55 States of America: 5 places that could become U.S. States in your lifetime. Surging Seas. 10 Mega-Construction Projects That Could Save the Environment — and the Economy. Could Brazil be the next space superpower? 2012. List of emerging technologies. Future Timeline | Technology | Singularity | 2020 | 2050 | 2100 | 2150 | 2200 | 21st century | 22nd century | 23rd century | Humanity | Predictions | Events.
50 Posts About Cyborgs. Futurism News, Videos, Reviews and Gossip - io9. Futurism News, Videos, Reviews and Gossip - io9. Backgrounder News, Videos, Reviews and Gossip - io9. Dealing with Real Dystopias is Part of My Job. The Better Angels of ... Science Fiction? New technologies enter our lives and society in four stages.