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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?
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.
Seems to not break any phisical law (?) and will have a good impact in... well, anything not related with the oil industry.
I think if we can work out the logistics of time travel, the other three dimensions shouldn't provide too much of an issue.
The Mothership
unaging.
Physically staying 27 until I die from something other then natural causes.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
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.
I vote with the two above. Wake me up when the String Hypothesis actually earns the name "theory"!