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Where Are The Edges Of Today's Technology World?
Veeru writes "As
mentioned on Nova,
my great-great-grandfather Amos Ives
Root published the first eye witness account of the Wright Brothers flight
almost 100 years ago. Scientific
American had rejected
his article as 'unbelievable' and 'having no practical application'. The secretive Wright Brothers
allowed Amos to publish
the article in his own Gleanings Bee magazine instead. Because of his objective account, other
experimenters may not have received the credit
they deserved. I recently realized
that Amos was intent on investigating
the highest tech advances of the day and that the airplane was the most
advanced phenomenon he could find. If
Amos were alive today, what obscure technology would he be
pursuing?"
We are living in an age quite different from 100 years ago. Information travels pretty fast. It is difficult for something that important to remain obscure so long today. Further, people more or less stopped noticing technological advances and taking them for granted. If any individual inventor/scientist gets some success he would want to approach venture capitalists, news papers, journals before he/she turns it into something great and useful. So, in my opinion it is difficult to find something obscure which is great. Yes, it is certainly possible that things people earlier thought wouldn't work becoming something great.
Wireless technologies provide endless ways to invade privacy - RFID, Credit Cards, Cell Phones, EZPass, PDA, GPS, subcutaneous transponders implanted when you walk through a mall entrance, Microsoft License activation, whatever.
Clearly the most important technology of the future will be the development of personal jammers to silence the RF nattering of the post-PC era world of gizmos carried about one's person, implanted under skin (overtly or surreptitiously) or attached into clothing. Everyone will be looking for RF cones of silence, ways to use a taser like device to EMP a wireless spybot picked up by walking into a movie theatre (or implanted by the Selective Service) or shielded pouches to prevent RF attacks on credit cards or other payment/identification devices.
If I was looking to report on bleeding edge tech, this is where I would look.
You think spyware like Gator is bad? You haven't seen nothing yet.
- "what substantial everyday product could be discovered/invented that we don't have already? We have cars, planes, phones, radios, musical instruments, diagnostic machines, robotics, computers, refrigerators, bass boats, thinkgeek.com...
I don't know. Maybe I'm a cynic but it seems to me that we've got pretty much everything we need."
I'm sure that not that long ago, someone said "We have the printing press, the locomotive, steamships, and the telegraph...It seems to me that we've got pretty much everything we need"They're all several trillion miles ahead of the solar system's travel through the universe, beacuse while they nailed down the bit about time travel, they completely forgot to include a coordinate system so they'd actually show up on earth.
So rather they ended up in space exactly where the earth was when they pressed "go" on their time machine.
It's complications like that that make me wonder if time travel hasn't already been invented, it's just the poor guy sent himself into a deadly vacuum.
Please, can we stop calling it "nanotechnology" and start calling it what it really is?
CHEMISTRY!
I'm not trying to be funny. That new stain-defender stuff in pants? Apparently it's called nanotechnology. No! Chemistry! It's just chemistry! Stop subjecting your minds to buzzwords.
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
There is nothing valueable in space within our grasp as far as anyone knows if that changes so does my thesis but untill then the status quo is best left to persist.
Nuts. If we were to exploit the resources space offers us without going into any other major gravity wells (i.e., sticking to free space, asteroids, small moons, etc), there is (just off the top of my head):
- Enough energy for everyone alive in the world today to live better than the average American presently does.
- More gold, coal, natural gas, nickle, iron, etc. etc. than has ever been mined in the history of mankind.
- Enough room, sunlight, water etc. for us to feed many times our present population as well as we feed the richest few now.
- Enough room for all of us to spread out and live interesting lives.
What more do you want exactly?-- MarkusQ
You forgot the "IMHO" part...
You may think that space flight is a huge waste of dollars. Many others do not. So long as it's not your money being spent, why should you care? "Ah" you say, "but it *is* my money, 'cos NASA is taxpayer funded." But that's the beauty of the X-prize competition that the grandparent post was referring to - it's purely privately funded. So it really doens't matter what you think about space flight. They're going to do it anyway. Who knows, maybe you'll even derive some benefit from it at some point.
We have basic space filight now. Its fairly safe and the costs are resonable.
Uh, in a word, bullshit. Especially on the "costs are reasonable" part. It costs on the order of $500 Million for a single shuttle launch, and they only happen a few times a year (and require a standing army of several thousand to support them). The whole point of the X-prize is to develop cheap, reliable, regular space launch. Everyone in the space industry (and I speak here as someone in the space industry) views launch costs as one of the greatest impediments to doing more in space. That applies to unmanned as well as manned missions.
There is simple no return on investment in continued research.
I won't even bother to debate the stupidity of that comment. The fact that people are investing would tend to imply that there is at least some perception of an ROI. Although it may depend on what exactly you consider an adequate ROI, and what time scales you are operating on.
We have a space station or will very soon, we have the shuttle which works well enough.
See above for the shuttle. It costs a crapload. Far more than it needs to. Mostly as a result of a piss-poor design that was more political compromise than anything else. The station is a nice idea but appears to be a bit of a white elephant. Right now it can only deal with a crew of up to 3, which is not a sufficient number to allow any science to take place (too busy just maintaining the station). And my understanding from talking to folks in the science community is that the station is essentially useless for it purported primary purpose, microgravity research, because astronaut induced vibrations screw up the "microgravity" environment in all but a very small part of the station.
There is nothing valueable in space within our grasp as far as anyone knows if that changes so does my thesis but untill then the status quo is best left to persist.
It's a cost/benefit thing - there's lots of stuff in space that's be nice to make use of, but it costs too much to get it right now. Why? Well, launch costs have a lot to do with that (see above). Highly recommend that you check out a report called "LEO on the Cheap" by Lt. Col. Jack London that discusses that cascading effects of high launch costs, and how to fix them (should be available in PDF form on line - google is your friend).
I read in some physics journal once that even if you could travel faster then the speed of light you probably need around 1 1/3 times the sqare of the mass you will be moving in fule.
Depends a lot on the efficiency of your engine. Alternatively, you could make use of something like a laser sail to accelerate - then you don't need to carry any fuel. A third alternative is not to accelerate to the speed of light, but to bypass it, i.e. use one of the various (somewhat flaky at this point) "warp drives" that have been proposed. All are at least as plausible (or more plausible) than a time travel machine. Incidentally, did it occur to you that time travel is equivalent to faster than light travel in the Einsteinian universe?
The solar system travels through space relative to what, exactly? Which location would you use as a frame of reference to measure its travel through the cosmos?
The center of our galaxy?
The center of all the visible galaxies? Oh wait, that's our galaxy itself.
The center of the universe? Which center of the universe?
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
I think we are still at the very beginning of the information age... I can't imagine what kind of information storage and retrieval devices we will have in 100 years.
I'm not talking star-trek here.. let's look at what is technically feasible now, even if it's not economically viable.
Storing terabytes of information per cubic inch of some material, with picosecond access times.
Communication - Despite regulatory stifling of the internet.. the concept that if we follow standards, and cooperate, we can leverage all kinds of communication mediums, is here now. Speeds are going up and up.. the "last mile" problem is just momentary.
So.. as our ability to store and move information goes up and up.. so what?
We are getting good at digitizing things, too.
Movies. Audio.
3d scanners. Motion capture. Auto-generated 3d meshes from image analysis of 2d images...
Despite no real big noise about it now, there is ongoing progressive work in the field of image recognition.
Teleconferencing.
VoIP.
Wireless... look at what's happenign there. Look how much 802.11b stuff is changing how we think about wireless.. how many mom & pop outfits are providing services over it.. and that's a TINY, TINY slice of spectrum.. what would happen if we REALLY got serious about open wireless communcation?
The center of the universe? Which center of the universe?
If you were on the time machine engineering team, and you were tasked with this part of the problem, I would say your search to find a fixed reference point to make absolute measurements off of is overly hard and possibly not even useful.
How would you _know_ motion for objects sent through time is going to match relative motion from the center of the universe (or anything else)?
Perhaps a better/much easier strategy is to stick with relative measurements; send something back in time 1/1000th of a second. Record relative movement from the starting point. Send something back 1/100th, 1/10th, etc. etc., recording movement.
Continue so you get a nice large sample set, plot the data, generate a model describing the interaction between time jump vs. distance jump. Test the model to see that it behaves as expected, if not, experiment more until it is felt your model is adequately debugged.
You will then have a useful way of predicting what will happen, without ever having needed to base things on any absolute measurement. Seeking the center of the universe for a fixed reference is now a moot point.
You don't need to have absolute measurements to do useful things. +5vdc being used in various places within your computer as your read this? Knowing that relative value is all that is necessary; the fact that the absolute (if there were such a thing) voltage of that same circuit is actually +30,005vdc doesn't keep us from getting the job done.