Futurism
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What would make a project like this exciting is not scale, but realism. It's not exciting to hear that someone's dreamed up a 20-mile tower. I can sit back and dream up awesome super-science inventions too.
How Neal Stephenson's 20-Kilometer Space Tower Could Change Everything
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.
3 Ideas That Are Pushing the Edge of Science | Gadgets
Over the next 15 years, 600 cities will account for more than 60 percent of global GDP growth. Which of them will contribute the largest number of children or elderly to the world’s population?
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.
Raccoon laborers and plants designed for climate change: Charles Stross' Predictions for 2512
And please tell me you know how to read a thought experiment, can place your tongue in your cheek, and have heard of Charlie Stross.
Tomorrow morning I’m doing a presentation to the top executive team of a very large organization on the next 20 years.
The best visuals to explain the Singularity to senior executives
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.
While I agree with the idea of autonomous zones in the style of Sealand, Sealand itself is largely a thought experiment, and not a great example.
10 Structures That Could Help Us Build Civilizations on the Ocean
The refrain about unstoppable enhancement tries to borrow language from the fails in the war on drugs, but it's really a different animal. Sports are fundamentally defined by their rulesets, which are inherently arbitrary- but as far as arbitrary rule sts go, consuming food vs. consuming supra physiological doses of novel hormones seems tolerable. There's no absolute performance metric in sport- a world record may make for a nice feather in your cap, in the sports where they make sense, but winners and losers are defined by relative advantage- the sporting experience is the same whether everyone is doping according to sanctioned metrics or we endeavor to maintain the status quo- and these sanctioned doping schemes still have to include a testing regime that people will try to defeat.
Imagining the Super-Enhanced Athlete of the Future
9 Overlooked Technologies That Could Transform The World
Sorry to be a debbie downer, but there are still major practical limitations to gene therapy. The problem is that there's still no really "good" way of getting DNA into the cells of a living, breathing person.Let’s fix Mars.
Planetary Alchemy by Alan Smale | Lightspeed Magazine
Yeah, just threw that out there knowing it was a very complicated problem.
Will food shortages force us to become vegetarians?
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.
Future - Science & Environment - Global resources stock check
Who should pay when your robot breaks the law?
I once read a document that listed all the targets in a lawsuit. My friend was the sole survivor of a plane crash and he went to one of the most successful lawyers in his state.Futurism Resources
Future Society & Enviroment