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?

Comments

Kaku bears a hearing?

[CRCulver]

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).

Michio Kaku and Discovery

[xtracto]

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.

Linkage.

[urcreepyneighbor]

If anyone's interested in learning more about Dr. Kaku, here are some links to start with:

• personal website
• Wikipedia entry
• MySpace page,
• weekly radio show ( Explorations )
• and Coast to Coast AM guest profile

Dr. Michio Kaku also has a radio show

[certron]

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

No, not by itself

[StefanJ]

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.

Re:That's an easy one!

[19thNervousBreakdown]

You also assume that there's an absolute frame of reference... which there isn't.

Re:That's an easy one!

[spun]

The big bang as a point of reference? You do know it happened everywhere, right? I mean, it's not as if there was this superdense clump sitting in space that then exploded. There was no space.