Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Those points aside, I have been amazed by the research in nanotechnology and find the realm of mapping the human genome to be interesting as well. Perhaps subjects such as these would interest Amos? Perhaps these are not as obscure as other fields but these are certainly interesting studies.
*
troll blacklist. Please mo
As far out as it seems, there are real efforts in making a time machine. I forget what university was doing the research, but it involves using lasers crossing each other at 90 degree intersects to create a column or vortex of light. While this cannot let them travel back in time, it is theorized it will let particles travel through the time that the machine is turned on. I apologize for the specifics, but am sure the slashdot effect can find the specifics.
In the 50s and 60s, we were all under the impression that it'd be flying cars, robots and automated kitchens that cooked for you. Robots would be really smart and virtually be home helps.
:o) So maybe, just maybe, we need to revisit some of those older ideas to progress?
None of this has happened.
This is one of the reasons I'm skeptical of current nanotechnology and genetic solutions actually being major breakthroughs. It'll be like Moore's Law for technology - things will just progress, rather than achieve sudden overnight success. I mean flying - it's boolean - you fly or you don't fly. Once you've conquered that you can improve on it. Nanotechnology I feel really needs advances in AI and other technology fields which I feel are being neglected - batteries, vision systems, sensors - they all need to improve before nanotechnology takes off big time.
So maybe it's a disparity thing. Maybe we'll be held back in certain areas because other technologies aren't available yet - like Civilization
The technologies of the last 200 years have so far outstripped past human progress that the real action in the coming years/decades/centuries will be the philosophical, moral and political assimilation of technology. We've done an increasintly poor job of it as the pace of advancement has quickened; it'll be interesting to see what (if anything) causes a tipping point after which we'll really explore the full impacts of new technologies.
(Disclaimer: I think Bill Joy is an alarmist.)
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
Strontium Nuclear Batteries are one. Known about and succesfully demonstrated since the early 90s, a single 5gram piece can put out enough SAFE radiation to be turned almost directly into energy, that it can supply 75 watts for months on end. It's not harmful to animals, it's not expensive, it's no more expensive than sterodent.
It's also a technology that nobody believes has any use because of the words "nuclear" and "radiation"
It'll come soon enough
1. Practical Immortality
(it's right around the corner, hell, we could do it now if not for those damned ethics... that's a joke, son...)
2. Sustainable Fusion
(again, right around the corner. ITER WILL work, and unlimited, non-polluting energy is here... think what that means...)
3. The Ion Drive
(already proven, power being ramped up monthly by orders of magnitude, will open up solar system for exploration, mineral harvesting, golden age begun...)
Dozens more... it's a great, great time to be alive... although many people would have you believe different.
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
Just a thought, but why doesn't slashdot implement a feature that lists all of the rejected submissions on another page.
Obviously people would submit spam, so the reviewers would also have to have a "spam" (and possibly a "duplicate submission") button as well as a "reject" button.
It would provide an interesting read for all of the smaller bits of news whizzing around that none of us get to see due to the tight reviewing process.
Just look at any technology that appears to almost be magic. This is where the edge is. Bluetooth and WiFi are up there, guesture-based interaction is close. Imagine being able to unlock the door to your house with a (specific) wave of your hand, all worked out using sensors built into a ring or glove and relayed to the house's security system using an encrypted RF data technology. Personal Area Networking is a group of technologies with a lot of potential. There are many more examples, I'm sure.
It's not going to be all that long till governments apply the same principles to "mind persuasion." Yes, the attempts in the past have been laughable, from WWII's Rationing Slogans to the War On Drugs.
But sooner or later they are going to get it right. Just look at DeBeers, who managed to invent an entire social custom wrapped around crystalized carbon. And clear, colorless crystals at that.
No imagine that persuasion in the hands of Uncle Sam.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Brief history:
- Some people came up with a very interesting idea, and called it "Nanotechnology"
- The word got very popular, and so people started calling all sorts of other things "Nanotechnology" in the hopes that some of the coolness would rub off.
- People who knew about the original idea got annoyed by this, and people who didn't know about it fell into two groups: the ones who had no clue said "Gee, buzzwords, swell!"; the more cluefull noticed that the word was being applied to stuff that wasn't all that special and got annoyed without realizing that the orginal idea even existed.
Nanotech (in the original sense--what is now being refered to as eutachtic chemistry and/or machine phase chemistry) is to clasical chemistry what semiconductor technology is to leyden jar and cat fur electrical science. We aren't there yet (and may never be) but the idea doesn't deserve the glib dismissal it gets from the hipply cynical.-- MarkusQ
I think the next big advances are going to be in biology. No, I don't think we're going to live forever in the near future, there's not enough room for healthcare as a percent of GNP to make that a reality. The two big advances are going to be in:
1. Biology for manufacturing. Call your "nanotech" what you will, simulating large scale mechanics at a small scale just has too many problems. However, revamp bamboo to grow me a house, or corals to grow me dishes, and we're talking something that's got a market.
2. Computer interfaces. Right now we've got a few monkeys controlling robotic arms (and world superpowers, but I digress), and there are definitely parallels to be drawn to the world of various gliders and steam powered aircraft that were burgeoning around 1903. Something with huge economic and social potential, that can completely "change the world" in the way aviation promised to, is a moderate bandwidth back that bypasses our current sensory system.
Remember, sensory processing begins at the nerve endings in the sensory organs. Much of your brain's interpretation of what the eye sees is handled in the first few layers of cells in the retina.
A second problem is that of resonance. Your brain produces a reference wave and measures sensory input as an interference pattern to that wave. While you could easily exploit that phenominon to transmit data to the brain, it would be nearly impossible to make it believe the information is coming from the sensory organs.
That is not to say you could not produce very vivid images using this new sense. I recall an experiment where researchers were able to teach a blind man to see using pressure transducers on his back. They had a camera that would translate a signal from a black and white CCD into pressure intensities laid out like a grid. The subject was able to adapt that system into a crude form of vision. There are also reports of deaf people who "hear" by feeling the vibrations of speakers, at least enough to enjoy music.
This sense would have to be developed in people. But I could see it as a powerful tool. It would be cool if my car could translate data from proximity radar system into my brain. Instead of relying on mirrors I could "feel" the road around me. Know where the curb is. Sense that Kia in my blindspot. Vibe that cop over the next hill with the radar set.
Would it be sense like we know them? No. Instead it would be sensations the likes of which we had never known before.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Given things we are just learning, from a number of fields that appear initially very far apart, I think we might be able to do some very subtle things to keep people from interpreting what they see in an undesired way, or steer them towards a desired interpretation.
I can imagine this working in a lot of ways, some good, some not so good:
You come to an intersection in a hallway. Even though there are no signs, you are normally not a person with a good bump of direction and you are deep inside a very large building, you immediately get a feeling that left leads towards the shortest route to an emergency exit. Each time you come to another junction, this feeling adjusts to the new location.
You are outside a building. There is an unlocked door there, but unless you are supposed to go inside the building, it looks so uninteresting that you ignore it. If you were actually planning to rob the building, the door looks extremely dangerous in some ill defined way.
A highway crew re-grades a stretch of interstate, and installs some new reflective edging and lane markers. Traffic flow rate increases by 50% and traffic jams during rush hour are greatly reduced. Accident rates drop. Close observation reveals that people planning to use the exits or business bypass-loop are getting over into the best lanes much sooner than before, and are somehow more prone to pick good times to pass or make lane changes.
Obviously, if this is doable, it could also be abused:
"Our country allows free emmigration. These people could leave if they wished. Unless you think they can't see the crossing gate at the border."
"It's funny, but until I made up my mind to vote for Geefler, I hadn't even noticed those new "polling place here ->" signs. They really stand out, don't they."
While all this may sound far fetched, there are already some modest examples. Disney has built a "Tiger Hunt in India" themed ride in one of its parks, and uses decorative pictograms on a mock up crumbling ancient temple to tell a story of a race who angered the generic Disney "mother earth goddess" by ecological shortsightedness. They are punished by natural disasters, and then clean up their acts and the disasters stop happening. While most visitors don't have nearly enough time to puzzle out all the pictograms consiously, supposedly this ride has the lowest littering rate of any ride in the park.
I can see how this might become a much more robust and reliable technology, but given some of the examples, I'm not at all sure I want it to. A lot of it sounds like extensions of what some advertisers are using to overcome resistance to ads, and some of it sounds Orwellian, but either way, it may be possible to go a lot further towards mind control than most expect.
Who is John Cabal?
There's coal in space? I thought coal came from dead plants and dinosaurs. Even if there was coal just floating around, would we really want to bring it back here and burn it? Don't we have enought air pollution?
I used coal as a shorthand for "chunks of mostly carbon that aren't diamonds or graphite"--which is close enough to the generally accepted meaning that I'm willing to stand by the useage. At any rate, there are such lumps and if you brought some back here most people would agree to call them coal.
But you'd be nuts to bring them back, and even more nuts to burn them; their primary value would be in space for use in making stuff--mostly plastics, medicines, etc., but someday diamondoid materials, buckytubes, etc.
Additionally, I remember being taught in grade school that if there were 100% pure gold bricks just lying on the surface of the moon for the taking, it still wouldn't be fiscally worth it to go there and bring them back. It's just too expensive. Or so I was told.:)
So don't take it back to your old grade school. Gold isn't just pretty, it's useful. It's wonderfully conductive, corrosion resistant, ductile, etc.
Stop thinking like a colonialist, and start thinking like a colonist.
-- MarkusQ
The whole idea of taking traveling to the past seriously is pretty annoying. Quite simply, time travel into the past is not possible without abandoning the idea of causality.
This is simply not correct. Time travel does not contradict causality, only some people's concept of "free will".
To explain: You cannot "change" history, simply because it "is already there". The notion of going back and "overwriting" one history with another a la Back To The Future suffers from the "Second Time Around Fallacy". History can by definition not be changed.
History can, however, be influenced by a time traveler. The history we know has been produced by past events, some of which can have been caused by a time traveler. So when I go back, I know in advance that everything I do must be consistent with the history I know. How this is "enforced" is the big question, but I bet a bit of Bayesian probabilities are involved. By that I mean the following: The base probability of various events that may prevent me from killing my grandfather can be very low (e.g. the probability of loosing the gun down a chasm just before I reach his house). However, the conditional probability of these events given that I will not kill my grandfather is much higher. In fact, given that my grandfather most evidently survived my attempt, the only thing to be resolved is how my intended murder was averted. So, if I try, somehow I will fail (and this is where "free will" becomes problematic for some people).
However, I can still influence things in history. For instance, I could go back to look for some legendary treasure that hasn't been found - maybe it hasn't been found because I went back in time to find it before others and move it! The causal integrity is intact.
Two additional observations: The above disregards the possibility of "parallell universes". Conceivably, I could go back in time and start "a different history", i.e. a different universe. Given the current state of our knowledge, we cannot rule out that the universe branches into a finite or infinite number of parallell universes at intervals which could be real or infinitessimal. However, you could never move between those universes, so the integrity of the history of each universe would still be preserved. This means that a time traveler "changing history" would actually just move back to an earlier branching point and go down an alternative history.
Note also that causal loops are quite possible with time travel, and that this does not contradict causality in any way. So you could go back in time and introduce your grandparents to each other (unless you already knew for sure that they introduced themselves to each other).
Screws up your mind, doesn't it?
[I have used past and future tenses here, since Douglas Adams neglected leaving us with a copy of the book on the time travel grammar].