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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?
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!
The problem with time travel is although it may be possible to travel in time it would not be a good idea. Let me explain, if have an actual time machine and travel back lets say 1 week you would materialize millions of miles away from earth in the middle of deep space. The reason for this becomes obvious when you realise earth is actually moving through space faster than a speeding bullet thus totally stuffing up the usefulness of traveling through time.
I had a similar response to Hyperspace (although my specific irritations are lost in the mists of bad memory and over a decade of time). Honestly, I'm not really inclined to give a special weight to an inventor of String Theory anyway; I'm very unimpressed with the scientific merits of that theory and I rather feel it borders on a non-science.
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
Here's a real, functional light saber that can be built with todays tech:
Take a high-powered infra-red laser that can be focused with a lens so that the focal point is energetic enough to ionize air.
Now get a lens whose focus can be changed electrically (Quartz and germanium are two possibilities that come to mind, I know germanium is transparent to infrared, not too sure about quartz)
Put laser and lens in a handle, sweep the focus of the lens from just past the hilt out to about three feet and back, several times a second.
Voila! Nice hissing, glowing column of energy that looks like a sword, cuts like a plasma torch, and can be yielded with one hand.
Caveats: Beams wont block other beams like a real sword.
Wear safety goggles to protect remaining eye from laser.
Please just ignore the power cable running to the wall outlet.
PS, if you're silly enough to do this, please post video of mishaps on You Tube AND Darwin Awards!
The U.S. really needs an English to Wisdom dictionary.
Do you know what a troll is? The grandparent was not a troll. If you're looking for a generic insult for use on the internet, I not only suggest "n00b"; but also that you go back to playing Unreal Championship. While /. doesn't have the highest standards in the world, I think we're above the most blatant name-calling methods.
Ok... so theres a couple of ways to get around such things while still staying scientifically consistent.
1) Traveling backwards in time by going faster than the speed of light you know [(1-v^2/c^2)^.5] (will take infinite energy, but were talking time travel so lets hand-wave that away... maybe you get it back on the return trip or something). So first youve got your machine that can speed you up that fast, also for the sake of argument lets say the force you can generate is so large that you get to the speed of light in less than planck time (the first trick), thereby not interacting with anyone or traveling anywhere before you lose all mass and travel at light speed. From there, if you think about it (to avoid the root of a negative), the direction that light travels must switch, so once again youd be traveling through time at the same speed as now relative to earth and at the same location, only everything would be running opposite. So what you wanna do is once agian use your ultimate acceleration device but turn it on for a fraction of a second less, and this amount of time your accelerating is related to how far back in time you end up when you then decelerate to zero V relative to the earth, now youre at a point backwards in time relative to where you started, but if you try to interact with anything you'll have to do it all backwards, and plus you're not in the right spot which just isnt going to be fun. So heres the second trick, now you once again accelerate to lightspeed and a little bit beyond really quickly. Now youre in the past traveling in the direction of causality as we know it, but in the wrong spot( probably the middle of nowhere, you can check this by sending some smaller time machines ahead of you programemd to come back that can sense the surroundings) so you just travel through space until you get to where you want, and now you do whatever it is you wanted to do back there.
2)You don't actually go back in time, but a copy of you does. If the state of every subatomic particle in your body could be detected very near to the time before youre sent back, you wouldnt know the difference. So we take that information, compress it in some way (your DNA is basically a compressed human being, think about that), then send that signal through a microscopic wormhole moving at relativistic speeds relative to its nearby partner who you keep in a safe location, with some way for it to decompress itself. When you exited the slow moving partner you would end up in the same location but in the past.
I think if you could do that, most people would be too busy transporting their DNA all over the galaxy exploring all the habitable planets before time travel. What would your copy do? If it could send itself back, how/would you determine who shall remain alive or do you continue to infinitely clone yourself. Could this give way to the religious belief that somehow humans did start from thin air? Were Adam and Eve copies of an alien race who figured out how to transport their DNA signature to this planet to continue their race on a distant planet?
I think "alternate universes" could probably be explained with time/space warping though. They may not be alternate universes, but alternate planets that happen to interfere with your little time warp phenomenon. That wouldn't really be time travel, but a "natural" form of transportation without destruction.
The question that begs to be asked for time travel though: If you do travel back in time, and let's say you know exactly where you will end up. How do you get back? Let's say you build a device in the past (now present)... you've used resources from that time that could have been used for something else, creating the famous paradoxical situations. You could, by using a wrong plank of wood or stepping on a bug that might scare your ancestors into each others arms, change the course of your history, rendering you nonexistent. It would happen so fast, it would be like stepping off your time machine and vanishing into thin air. Along with your device. Not even mentioning airborne viruses that you could carry back with you.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
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.
You have to take into account the Earth wobbling slightly about the Earth-Moon barycenter, the Earth orbiting the Sun, the Sun orbiting the barycenter of the Milky Way Galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy orbiting the barycenter of the Local Group while it is drawn to the Andromeda Galaxy, and the Local Group being drawn to the Virgo Cluster while it's probably moving about the Virgo Supercluster.
Physicists, say the ever reliable Wikipeda (it's okay to use it while mocking it if I check it's sources, right?) are still debating on a step-up from superclusters called a galaxy filament. It makes me think that making sure Earth would be in the exact same space relative to everything else that influences its parent bodies' orbits would be almost as difficult as tracking the location of every object in the universe in the first place.
Since the Earth is moving at 30 km/s relative to the Sun, the Sun is moving at 240 km/s in a nearly circular orbit, and the Milky Way is moving at 100 km/s relative to the center of mass of the Local Group, maybe if you went back a day, you'd be 230 times the distance between Earth and the Moon, or half an AU, and since Warp Factor One in the original Star Trek series' inconsistent ship manual for the writers said that equals the speed of light, accounting for the location discrepancy would only take about 5 minutes, not taking into account the Virgo Supercluster, right?