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Why Don't We Invent That Tomorrow?
museumpeace writes "In the NYTimes book review blog, David Itzkoff takes a look at a new book devoted to predicting which 'science fiction' technologies may really fly some day. The author is Michio Kaku, one of the inventors of string theory, so he bears a hearing. His picks include light sabers, invisibility and force fields." Which sci-fi tech do you think needs to get invented over the weekend?
I don't expect much. Time travel of course. D'uh.
The Mothership
I like this guy's way of thinking.
Seriously.
At any scale. But nanoscale is my preference.
Ideally of types that interface cleanly with the human nervous system.
But that's just me.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Why Michio Kaku may be a fine mathematician, I think his ideas of technological progress are often shaky. I remember reading his book Hyperspace as a teenager and getting really irked by his repeated and fairly unrealistic visions of godlike power in the near future (an irritation at least one Amazon reviewer shares).
I dunno, string theory always seemed to me like something you would come up with at 3am while smoking a joint after having spent the past 6 hours polishing off a keg with your physicist friends.
"Hey man, you know what would be awesome? What if the whole Universe was really made up of a bunch of vibrating strings?"
"Whoa...I think you just blew my mind man...Hey, don't bogart that!"
Duh. Anyone who has to drive to work on Mondays will want one.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I heard a pretty convoluted explanation of how force fields might plausibly be made to work in the future. The party who explained it wasn't a Trekkie, either. Hey, who knows?
Hoverboards for pete's sake! I've been begging for those things for decades!
Or something to cancel out the noise of accordion players.
No sig today...
And invisibility? Nothing good would come of that either.
I'd be happy for a cure for the cold personally.
Careful What You Wish For....
No other advance would ever be as important as a quick way between the stars for colonization of other places in the galaxy. It would change our world so much indirectly just by us having the ability to leave it.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
Fembots
Where is my flying car?
But seriously I think that we should invent a real HUD system that could work through contacts but be powered just with body heat.
Able to say 'may I help you with anything else?' and mean it...
Requiem for the American Dream
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Seems to not break any phisical law (?) and will have a good impact in... well, anything not related with the oil industry.
A solution to world hunger. And war. And obesity. I guess that means my three picks would be
a. GM plants that make money grow on trees.
b. GM microbes that make violent impotent. IN whatever way is most effective.
c. GM Animals that hunt and chase fat people.
Oh, wait...between the UK and the US they pretty much have that done.
Michio Kaku hosted a series of documentaries from Discovery Channel, among them is 2057 The city. They are indeed quite interesting as they speculate on how the future (specifically the year 2057) might be, but they base their predictions in current technology being developed and researched.
Worth to see IMHO.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
...a prescient computer/AI that is powerful enough to steer a ship and intelligently communicate with its crew, but goes murderously insane once it's given two competing directives.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
unaging.
Physically staying 27 until I die from something other then natural causes.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Automated lawn sprinkler systems capable of delivering hydrochloric acid.
I'm sick of those damned teenagers hanging out on my lawn.
Duke Nukem Forever!
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
You know it's good one when you feel like you've been punched in the stomach after you read it.
We are sexy, sexy von Neumann Machines
Dr. Michio Kaku also has a radio show called Explorations that primarily features interviews with other scientists. Most of the stations that air it have audio archives of the program, too, so you can check it out if you like.
http://www.mkaku.org/radio/
Apparently, he also has a myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/mkaku
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The author is Michio Kaku, one of the inventors of string theory, so he bears a hearing
Yes, as much as he "bears hearing" on string theory.
First, the transporter device like in Star Trek is needed ASAP. This will eliminate the need for goods to travel in trucks on our already congested roads in the USA. Goods will arrive in warehouses, stores, homes, etc. practically instantaneously. And also, let's not forget about the person getting from point A to point B. Air, train and road travel is practically eliminated.
Second, the food replicator needs to be invented, which, again, is from Star Trek. Famine would be wiped out for good.
Now, this is all assuming that these inventions would be intended for good use.
"Happily lived Mankind in the peaceful Valley of Ignorance." -- Hendrik Willem Van Loon
Sexy female robot assassins? Sounds pretty cool to me.
"Cogito ergo sum"
I think therefore I am. (Loose translation).
I believe that his basic premis can be extended: "If it can be thought, it can be done." It almost seems that we (as humans) can only envision that which is possible - within some undefined metalogical framework. What I mean is, if it can be expressed in a way that is ultimately not contradictory in , then it is possible.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
We just need solar flares and a star gate for time travel.
and the SGC has laser guns and FORCE FIELDS.
The hard thing with laser guns is POWERING them.
There are being tested at area 51.
Even a magic Go Anywhere Fast drive, one that worked for interplanetary as well as across the depths of interstellar space, would not automatically open up the universe for colonization.
We'd still need great improvements in reaction drives, for example, to overcome the velocity differences between different star systems.
Lacking magical Star Trek style sensors, we'd need to find ways to detect and analyze planets.
Life support systems. Expedition craft that can handle a takeoff as well as a landing. Power sources. Cripes, it goes on and on.
Really, it's not like Masters of Orion or some other 4x game.
Me, I'd settle for that Mr. Fusion someone mentioned uptopic.
What I meant was: ultimately not contradictory in (some metalogical framework that logic and language only approximates}, then it is possible.
My bad for putting that in an HTML tag like expression (and not previewing first).
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Pfft. How about something useful like the fing-longer or the what-if machine?
"What if "C-a-t", really spelled "Dog"?
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
Read High Frontier, by Gerard O'Neill. Space colonies are perfectly feasible. Building one is more an exercise in putting existing technologies together than inventing new technologies.
I want to live in an O'Neill cylinder!
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
Faster than light travel.
Michio Kaku's predictions on technology frequently make me wonder just how good of a grasp he actually has on physics. My favorite is the old article where he predicts the way to escape the heat death of the universe by sending "atom-sized" nanomachines through a wormhole into a parallel universe where these machines would spread in a sphere at nearly light speeds.
Oh sure... we'll just ignore how something the size of an atom is supposed to contain any sort of parts capable of manipulating the environment as well as how they're supposed to encode information and make decisions. Might as well also ignore where such a machine is getting the energy to spread at light speed. Heck, why don't we just ignore reality entirely and get into exercises of sheer mental wankery, and...
Never mind, I keep forgetting he's a string theorist. Exercises in mental wankery that have no real attachment to physical reality is his bread and butter.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Replication! That way, every Slashdot guy and gal can have his or her very own CowboyNeal!! Even your pet CowboyNeal can have his or her very own CowboyNeal!!
Sounds like a procrastinator's approach to invention.
I like the idea of the "finglonger", since they are close the the Smell-o-scope
(http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/13/1418216&from=rss "Smell of Space").
I'd like to see more research into faster than light communication. I've had several ideas using Quantum Entanglement and the 'Spooky Effect' to achieve this but there'd be some testing needed, thankfully none of it would require launching anything into space.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Out of all the tech that could be made, this is the only one that allows you to see all the tech that could be invented down the line. Time has become to me my most precious and scarce resource. By the time I've got things worked out well enough to really be great, I'll have very little time left. I could easily enjoy 500 years of life. Beyond that I can't say for sure, but I'd like to see.
I predict that at some point in the distant future, the idea that people let themselves die when they didn't really want to will be considered absurd. To the degree that it is possible for us to solve aging, our current apathy about it is a little like voluntary genocide. Of course there are certain odd implications when people can live as long as they like, but population scaling is something we have to deal with in any case.
People are working on this, the notion of the afterlife (just about the most tenuous fairy-tale idea I can imagine) keeps us from really making it a priority.
(I realize that solving current diseases and war and such are just as important and in the same vein, but we're talking outlandish tech here.)
Cheers.
We need about 6.8 billion of those.
Although if someone could recreate the "camera" that Oliver Wendell Jones first built, that'd be good for some laughs, too.
I'd settle for a teleporter, if worse came to worse.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Subvocal embedded comm links, and HUDs either in contacts or also embedded. Along with everything else from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
Free beer and pizza
You'd still be a virgin anyway.
Near free, safe, energy. There's lots of it around, need better access to it.
Finally, a /. article for which the mention of golly gee whiz SciFi stuff in the summary isn't a gratuitous insert. Kaku really talks about this stuff. Rationally.
Parts of the book relating to wormholes, time travel and teleportation have been adapted by Kaku himself and published in the March 2008 ("Special Einstein") issue of Discover magazine. You can get an unadulterated taste of the book and a bunch of other nifty stuff about Einstein, relativity and such all in one package.
I think the claim he was an inventor of string theory isn't entirely accurate. However, he was co-author of the first paper on string field theory, which showed the five versions of string theory to be different versions of the same underlying mechanism. I think "rescurer" would be more accurate than "inventor" as well as being worth more credit.
Despite publishing other popular books previously including a best seller, hosting a 4 part BBC special, a 3 part Discovery Channel special and two different weekly radio shows, he's so far managed to dodge the inevitable unwashed masses and supposedly washed whiny insiders who show up to tip the ivory tower of popularizers of science. Last time it was Brian Greene. Even Sagan was so assailed until he forced their forgiveness by dying at them. Let's see how Kaku weathers the storm following the massive attention this new book is getting him. Including one picture of the Stargate and one of a Kirk led landing party being beamed down in the Discover article should help bring them out of the woodwork.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Obviously we need new souces of energy to replace fossil fuels. Zero Point energy seems to be a good choice. I don't expect that we could get a ZPM small enough to carry around in your hands like they do on atlantis, but something the size of a bus would be good enough.
We should invent the Enterprise NCC 1701
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I know this is so far out, but how about FOOD for HUNGRY PEOPLE. 3 words Duke Nukem Forever;)
I thought quantum entanglement is specifically what made faster than light (or at least so fast it arrives before it was sent) information exchange impossible. FTL communication sure would be incredibly useful though--it would obsolete those light-based computers before they finally become feasible.
A fool and his lamb are worth two in the bush.
tomorrow is always one day in the future, so how about we invent time travel one day into the future today?
Makers - like in Transmetropolitan. You feed it junk, and it reconstructs molecules to give you anything you want, eg. a cup of coffee.
"...this is going to be the best prom ever..."
I am Jack's smirking revenge.
I vote with the two above. Wake me up when the String Hypothesis actually earns the name "theory"!
with delicious jubblies.
I get to have something invented over the weekend??
GNU Hurd!
Light saber; because we live among freaking jedi???
Invisibility; will that reduce the chance of innocent bystanders getting shot at and blown up???
Force field; yes, because it's just next logical step to do so with technology that made light saber and invisibility possible can now be combined to create a freaking invisible force field which will only let my light saber to pass and stab you while your freaking has-been century old pistol with 120mm exploding pallets just won't be able to touch me.
oh snap! did i just hurt your feeling, Jedi boy?
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Your vision of the future is as sci-fi as your knowledge of human nature. What do you think would really happen if distances in space could be easily overcome and we would start a colonization run? Who would want to lay claim to what? How would these claims be resolved? What makes you think that just going to a new world would solve anything?
It's a good dream though, but first we got to figure out how to live with each other in peace on this rock before we scorch the next.
There's so much energy just lying about the place. We need some kind of matter-energy furnace that allows us to dissociate matter into energy and resociate energy into matter. GO GO.
A pair of glasses with a universal ad blocker. By universal I mean digital banners as well as real ones.
So each holiday season we will have people tying their cowboyneals to a tree in the forsest thinking the critter can take care of itself.
It is already bad enough the slashdot staff does this before every outing, do you really want our forests overrun by feral CowboyNeals?
Now, cloning Natalie Portman, and some way to easily heat up grits, THAT is tech talk!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
High output, low (or no) waste power. Fusion or anti-matter. ...or high temp superconductors at the very least.
Hundreds of things will stem from the former....
Locators and augmented reality, a la Vernor Vinge. Locators reduce the world to something that computers can handle, and act as computers and sensors themselves. Augmented reality lets everyone in on the fun.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
The one thing we have yet to measure is how fast the "spooky effect" occurs. A good way to do so, I think, would be to make a pair of radios that use quantum entanglement for data transmission (IE they can only communicate with each other.) Place them on opposite sides of the world, and try holding a conversation. With that distance, you should be able to get an idea of just how fast this effect happens. If you could hold a conversation as if you were on a landline, as opposed to the lag you'd get with say, a cellphone, then there's the possibility that you could have faster than light communication. '
Another way to test would be to build two quantum-entangled network cards, put one in a satellite, the other in a computer, and measure a round-trip ping a couple thousand times. Up and back would be typically around 1-1.25 seconds for normal satellite transmissions, last I remembered. Hopefully this would be far faster.
Just ideas and theories, don't pay me any mind.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
We need that time machine idea so we can go back in time and get the cars of the future! In 1997 GM released the EV-1 (wiki it) Now if the oil companies didn't kill it....we'd have them right now. And no Iraq war probably...
Heisenberg compensator and painless suppositories.
Let's just pass a law, or whatever, that as soon as all this stuff gets invented 1,000's of years in future, somebody has to travel back to this coming weekend and divulge the secrets of this new technology.
The cool things is to have windows that bounce up and down like a good tits.
Lightsabers and transporters and all that can wait..
I always found the stuff they did in the holodeck kinda boring.. re-enacting old books and walking around scenic places.. I`d be jumping motorcycles across buildings GTA4 style.
Which sci-fi tech do you think needs to get invented over the weekend?
A Windows release that actually works as advertised.
photosMy Photostream
On monday I will be starting my own internet and the RIAA, MPAA, BPI, CRIA, etc arn't invited.
I only buy pepper spray that's been tested on anti-vivisectionists.
University or Corporation, and yes I even contacted M$.
www.fossai.com
I just wrote some papers on AI yesterday. I think chapter 1 bears a read by anyone interested in AI.
God spoke to me.
But the cold being cured takes away 5 legitimate paid days off work for me....please don't cure it....pleeeeaaasee?
Howe due yoo keap uh gramur natsee bizzy four ours?
Which sci-fi tech do you think needs to get invented over the weekend?
A cure to the common cold. Sooner is better than later. This cold sucks.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
No other advance would ever be as important as a quick way between the stars for colonization of other places in the galaxy. It would change our world so much indirectly just by us having the ability to leave it.
You think we have an illegal alien problem now, Zorton's are invisible.
Table-ized A.I.
I'll leave it up to the hardcore fans to point out stuff like geosynchronous orbit satellites, small communication devices, etc. All that were mentioned in SF stories before their introduction to real life.
20-20 hindsight is usefull here. Maybe you just haven't waited long enough yet for your favorite stories to yield uncanny farsightedness or simply get dated.
The best stories do neither - they don't rely on tech that can become dated, nor make a good guess on what might be, they just tell a good story about a possible, but believable future...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
with my trusty 12-gauge shotgun anyday. The "light sabre" is funny: easy to cut off a leg (or worse) with that one!
Actually, I'd be happy with Permutation City. Just get me out of this crazy chunk of meat.
I was at a supercomputing conference in Oregon a few years back. Michio Kaku was the keynote speaker, talking about his predictions of fundamental limits on various technologies. He started spouting on about some semiconductor limit but as he was speaking there was a bit of a commotion coming from the back. Eventually it was revealed that there was a bunch of guys from some research lab disputing over whether or not to mention their latest work before making an official announcement. You see, they'd already broken Kaku's limit.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I would like to see a giant thinking machine that is able to answer any question we give it.
then i would ask it for the answer to the ultimate question.
-I only code in BASIC.-
Some device to rid the world of greedy lawyers, shifty music and movie companies. A device that will permanently and irrevocably rid the world of the RIAA/MPAA/MAFIAA/IFPI/CRIA. Nothing much just one simple device that will simply wipe them off the face of the earth as if they never existed.
A technology that can be invented (unlike those Star Trek fantasies) is a radar to help avoid car collisions. Ever seen bats in a cave? they don't collide, even if they flight really fast and in very confined spaces...so it's doable for the cars, and it will save thousands of lives and lots of money.
This would be really neccesary, because with the tricorder you would be able to see, how politicians and multinational companys fucked up this world, and with the pill that makes you instantly bright and smart like Albert Einstein, you would be able to understand the reading from the tricorder.
No other advance would ever be as important as a quick way between the stars for colonization of other places in the galaxy. It would change our world so much indirectly just by us having the ability to leave it.
Um, suicide booths would have the similar effects for the remaining earth population. Nah, sleeper colony ships that just use the colonists as spare body parts for the remaining population. It would breed out/lessen the urge to colonize. Star Trek replicators and Niven Style teleporters would have better positive social effects. All cheap space travel does is shift your domestic problems from home to the outworlds/rim where they aren't visible or have their power base any more.
It's called patents and it's fucking up human progress.
You just have to set the gravitational point of origin to be the Earth, you know the pyramid with the circle on top.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
If they invented a replicator, I would get one and immediately have it produce a transporter, lightsaber, robots, holodeck, etc. Then I'd have all the goodies associated with each.
Oh wait.. a replicator "REPLICATES" an existing object, so I guess I'd be out of luck. Dangit.
...where is the foundation in the assumption that if you travel back in time, your position in the three traditional dimensions (X, Y, Z) remains static?
Presume you're currently traveling along with time so that at time t0 you're at [0,0,0], at time t1 you're at [1,0,0]. If you go back to t0, then why would you still be at [1,0,0] and not automagically back at [0,0,0]?
( Note that personally I presume in this scenario that if you timetravel you'll do nothing more than would rewinding a tape; you'd immediately lose all knowledge of your timetravelling and do the exact same things all over again, completely negating the point of time travel in the first place. It's a lot more elegant than having to worry about 'materializing' in the middle of something else, or worrying about there being two you's, or you changing the course of future history or somesuch. )
So late comer to the conversation, and didn't see any other mention of it....But did anybody else notice the TARDIS / Police box on the book cover?
Give me a Staples easy button that *really* works.
Fembots, and you couldn't make them fast enough for the demand on Slashdot alone. Bra gun not included.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
We could do it all with Solar, combined with currently available storage technologies. Heck we could even do it all with geothermal if we wanted to bad enough. (Yes, deep drilling tech has reached the point where we could access dry hot rocks just about anywhere we want to, and pump water into them, extracting steam to turn turbines.) If we use a variety of techniques, there's no reason we could cut fossil fuel use down to nothing, with tech we already have.
Check out:
http://www.mfoundation.org/index.php?pagename=research
He's also given some TED talks:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/39
And a Google Tech Talk:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8554766938711591377
> I'd be happy for a cure for the cold personally.
It's called Pleconaril. The FDA wouldn't approve it, even though it apparently works nicely and reliably stops a cold in its tracks, because they weren't happy about people taking antiviral meds for a disease (almost) nobody actually dies from.
They're now trying to get it approved for some other disease. With a little luck, they'll succeed -- once it's stocked by drugstores, doctors can legally prescribe it "off label" for anything they like. Including (of course) a cold.