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

That's an easy one!

[The Ancients]

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.

Re:That's an easy one!

[EEPROMS]

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.

Re:That's an easy one!

[The Ancients]

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

Re:That's an easy one!

[The Ancients]

It's worse than you thought - you're mom was real cute when she was younger ;-)

Re:That's an easy one!

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

It's worse than you thought - you're mom was real cute when she was younger ;-)

That sounds like something my Dad would say....hey wait a minute!

Re:That's an easy one!

[Soleen]

I just invented a time machine, without the problem that you described.

It has some limitations but it already works!
Limitations are following: it drives in one direction only (forward), and with speed no faster than 60 seconds a minute!

This in 60 seconds you can travel 1 minute in future!

Re:That's an easy one!

[SQLGuru]

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

Re:That's an easy one!

[Cal Paterson]

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.

Re:That's an easy one!

[repapetilto]

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.

Re:That's an easy one!

[nschubach]

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.

Re:That's an easy one!

[RiotingPacifist]

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!

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!

[Kligat]

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?

Re:That's an easy one!

[Clueless Nick]

Everybody knows that when you travel in time, your arrival at your destination is heralded by strong winds, electric storms, and thunder. Don't believe me? Refer to these:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088247/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103064/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181852/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118689/

No rational car driver, sane bird or other sentient being would want to pass through that!

Re:That's an easy one!

[Fred_A]

Well, maybe you could use the earth's gravity then; you would step into your time travel vehicle, move back a second, fall back to earth, move back another second, fall back to earth again (or reposition yourself). If you do it quickly, you wouldn't notice, and you'd still be on earth when you arrived. That's pretty much the system I'm using, except I'm moving forward in time, not back, and it takes a second to move a second. But it's very reliable so I'm confident I'll get there eventually.

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).

Re:Kaku bears a hearing?

[CheshireCatCO]

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.

Re:Kaku bears a hearing?

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

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.

Re:Kaku bears a hearing?

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

A few inches in diameter? Is that a ballista in your pocket, or are you happy to see me?

Both!

String Theory

[eln]

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!"

Re:String Theory

[PC and Sony Fanboy]

"DUDE ... have you ever seen a molecule on WEED? Totally different ... its all ... stringy"
motions a bunch of other scientists over to look in the microscope
"Duuude... why're we staring into a bong?"

Re:String Theory

[toastee]

My bong has been known to cause passage of time to speed up in a very localized fasion.

Teleporters

[Opportunist]

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

More weapons??

[Izabael_DaJinn]

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.

Easy: Method of Locomotion to another Solar System

[MrPerfekt]

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.

One word

[AresTheImpaler]

Which sci-fi tech do you think needs to get invented over the weekend?

Fembots

Obligatory

[Bryansix]

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.

Re:"Mr Fusion"

[The Ancients]

Or something to cancel out the noise of accordion players.

Already been invented. Called a gun.

bears a hearing?

[Red Flayer]

FTS:

The author is Michio Kaku, one of the inventors of string theory, so he bears a hearing

I've got a friend who also likes to talk about things that should be invented, he's a mechanic, so he hears a bearing.

Re:bears a hearing?

[PiMuNu]

The author is Michio Kaku, one of the inventors of string theory, so he bears a hearing.

After all, an inventor of string theory must be an expert on science fiction...

Re:bears a hearing?

[proxy318]

Yeah, well I've got a friend who's a fisherman, and he bears a herring. I've also got a friend who's a pirate, and he wears an earring. I could do this all day.

Mr.Fusion

[gmuslera]

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

Re:I could certainly use...

[eln]

I don't see why you're putting all this pressure on GM to get all of this done. Surely Ford or even, God help us, Chrysler could pitch in too?

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

My pick

[geekoid]

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

Re:My pick

[MorePower]

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.

My pick ...

[garett_spencley]

Automated lawn sprinkler systems capable of delivering hydrochloric acid.

I'm sick of those damned teenagers hanging out on my lawn.

Duh

[Gat0r30y]

Duke Nukem Forever!

Been Done

[my $anity 0]

We are sexy, sexy von Neumann Machines

Re:"Mr Fusion"

[Weaselmancer]

How about an identical accordion 180 degrees out of phase with the offending accordion?

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.

Screw that, I want space colonies

[Quattro Vezina]

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!

A peace ray.

[smellsofbikes]

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.

Re:Lightsabers...

[Captain DaFt]

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!

Needs inventing by Saturday night

[snowful]

Free beer and pizza

ZPM

[rossdee]

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.

Moved and seconded...

[Jane Q. Public]

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

Re:Fembots...

[Viceroy Potatohead]

Granted it's not sci-fi tech, but...Fsck that sh!t. If I have my choice of sci-fi female/femaleish characters, I'll take the Bene Gesserit over lousy robots, any day...

Crap... now I want to create a lulzcat image of a 300lbs, slick skinned, unshaven geek with exaggerated, plaintive eyes and the caption "U Has Bene Gesserits?"

True story

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

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.