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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?

12 of 439 comments (clear)

  1. Teleporters by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Duh. Anyone who has to drive to work on Mondays will want one.

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    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  2. More weapons?? by Izabael_DaJinn · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Guns and sabers. That's not a very innovative future.

    And invisibility? Nothing good would come of that either.

    I'd be happy for a cure for the cold personally.

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    Careful What You Wish For....
  3. Obligatory by Bryansix · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  4. Mr.Fusion by gmuslera · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Seems to not break any phisical law (?) and will have a good impact in... well, anything not related with the oil industry.

  5. Re:That's an easy one! by The+Ancients · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think if we can work out the logistics of time travel, the other three dimensions shouldn't provide too much of an issue.

  6. My pick by geekoid · · Score: 5, Insightful

    unaging.
    Physically staying 27 until I die from something other then natural causes.

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    1. Re:My pick by MorePower · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why would you need to be allowed to retire. I'm going to retire as soon as I have enough money invested to live on the interest plus some extra to grow the principle enough to offset inflation each year. That's well before "official" retirement age, which is good considering how few of my male relatives even lived to their sixties.

      It's not even really hard to save up that money, the key seems to be "don't have kids", which would be even more important in a world with immortality.

  7. Re:Kaku bears a hearing? by TheLazySci-FiAuthor · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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).


    Ah, the delusion of grandure. I do agree that futurologists are guilty of this - but what we have even today is really quite grand.

    What he's doing though seems to me to be mere extrapolation. Let us go back a few thousand years and try to explain to your average hunter/gatherer that in the future we have an arrow which can shoot all the way around the world and completely obliterate 50 square miles of whatever we aimed it at. That's pretty godlike, and that kind of technology came along with the microwave oven and color television.

    The hunters arrow creates a hole a few inches in diameter - the hydrogen bomb creates a crater many hundreds of meters in diameter, so a weapon of a few thousand years from now should be able to create a blemish in matter approximately 1000 miles in size, a few thousand years past that and the weapon would make a big hole almost 6 million miles in size.

    thousands of years are not long periods of time to the universe, I won't continue to extrapolate into the millions of years of humanities progress.

    I think, if we survive and continue to progress like this, that we will be pretty bad-ass indeed.
  8. ZPM by rossdee · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  9. Re:That's an easy one! by SQLGuru · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Is it a safe assumption that we have never been in the same place twice? Even with the variables that we know, how many other orbits / vectors are we following? Assuming some universal coordinate system origin, I would almost believe that Earth has never been at the same coordinates since the birth of the universe.....and might not until the death of the universe.

    Layne

  10. Moved and seconded... by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I vote with the two above. Wake me up when the String Hypothesis actually earns the name "theory"!

  11. Re:That's an easy one! by RiotingPacifist · · Score: 3, Insightful

    But in the earth coorinate system, were always in the same place.

    People are quite happy to accept that we cant travel faster that c, but soon forget that all frames of reverance are all equal. There is no aether, no absolute position, no zero velocity, hell there aint much apart from acceleration!

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