33 replies to this topic

[Ironwolf]

I think everything would be for getting more powerfull and smaller at the same time. In medical would be a big thing.
If I had my way, Ghost in the Shell would be reality

[MSpencer]

Already we have systems where a doctor on one end can perform surgery by indirectly controlling robotic arms on the other side while using some cameras to get a good look. Not the best of systems yet, but it's certainly on its way. Right now it is used as a demonstrator for medical students, but eventually a French doctor might be able to perform surgery on a woman in China without leaving his desk.

[duke_Qa]

"user disconnected by peer"

and yeah, the ghost in the shell scenario is one of the more elaborate examples of how the future might become, as always in these thread you can't go around that . watch the television series if you can, even though the special AI-robots might be a bit unrealistic, the rest is pretty interesting...

on the topic of the hospital robots again, its quite interesting to see that one can use machines to operate on people. a nice step in the progress would be if one could automate advance surgery.

[AdmiralGT]

hmm, if its not religion its conspiracies.

as i wrote earlier today, but failed to post out of some unknown reason, EMP does not really interest me too much as its basically only useful in war. fission and fusion might be used to create nuclear weapons, but at least they can be used to create energy too. thats not the case with EMP's, they just destroy electrics.

superconductors and quantum computing are interesting topics too. not that i've really managed to tweak the thought around the quantum computing in my head yet...

You forget that most major scientific breakthroughs are made because of the military and it's needs. The computer was an inspired military project (the Enigma machine), television (for propaganda), GPS, most medications. Most electronic components are originally made for the military for its various equipment. While that's slowly changing, I can assure you that the budget the military spends on research is much greater than the general research budget

What will be the revolutionary technology of the 21st century? Lasers, Giant Lasers.

[duke_Qa]

i'm not saying that war is not the main source of inventions, im saying that i don't see any direct positive usages of EMP in civillian lifes unless it kills cancer or something. i've said it many times that war increases inventions manyfold.

what would giant lasers be used for outside killing people?

[AdmiralGT]

Not much use really, except we can all go around saying as have a "giant laser".

As for EMP, while the technology of EMP will not benefit us generally, the technology used to make it, no doubt will.

[Blodo]

Actually lasers are pretty useful in optics and all that thing. Right now it is possible (albeit costly) to operate on the human eye with a laser. In the future it might just be reduced to a small enough device for each optician to have one in their office. If improved enough, bad eyesight would probably become history.

[duke_Qa]

thats true, and EMP's can probably be used in psychiatric asylums as advanced restarting of the brain i.e. shock therapy

[MSpencer]

Only if they had cybernetic brains...

[Ironwolf]

Then they'd just be dead/brain dead. Cause EMPs kill off electronics.
But Im also one to think that war sparks inventions most of the time..

[MSpencer]

There is a way to reformat the brain though, I'm sure. It's just matter of basically... booting to system your entire long term memory. I don't know enough about neuroscience as to how exactly it could be done, but I do know that if you can psychologically induce trauma or shock, the mind will generally forget a hell of a lot, perhaps even their name (It was quite a theme among Nazi officials, the ones who went to camps and the ones who didn't, oh and concentration camp victims). Another way that you could do it is possibly something biochemical. I know there are some proteins which promote memory loss, just like a few proteins control aging. All you would need to do is deliver a massed dose of those. An electronic signal wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility, Stephen King's Cell explores that in some depth, but purely on a mechanical level treating the human brain much like a computer harddrive.
Speaking of a computer harddrive, if someone had a serious mental issue (Nuts, etc.), we could simply remove part of the brain and replace it with a computer part which performs the same task, just hooking it up to the neural network. It wouldn't be too much beyond our current capabilities either.

Edited by MSpencer, 25 August 2006 - 01:56 PM.

[Cossack]

I think nanotechnology will be the next big thing. Effecient fusion power is a long way off, seeing as the most advanced fusion reactor, the ITER (being constructed in Cadarache, France), will use substantially more energy than it produces.

With nano technology there is always the fear of the "grey goo" hypothesis. Because nanotechnology works on such a miniature scale, there must be miniature builders as well, that construct the nano materials. Because there needs to be and extensive amount a builders to get anything done, they will be programmed to duplicate themselves under certain conditions, and when these conditions are stopped , they will stop duplicating. There is, however, a theory that states that if the continue duplicating even when the specific conditions are not met, the "grey goo" would consume theearth and possibly the universe in a very short period of time.

"Thus the first replicator assembles a copy in one thousand seconds, the two replicators then build two more in the next thousand seconds, the four build another four, and the eight build another eight. At the end of ten hours, there are not thirty-six new replicators, but over 68 billion. In less than a day, they would weigh a ton; in less than two days, they would outweigh the Earth; in another four hours, they would exceed the mass of the Sun and all the planets combined - if the bottle of chemicals hadn't run dry long before."

Eric Drexler, on Grey Goo

Other types of goo I found very interesting:

-Pink Goo is mankind. It replicates relatively slowly, but some people think it will nevertheless fill any amount of space given enough time. In the pink goo worldview the spread of humanity is a catastrophe and space exploration opens up the possibility of the entire galaxy or the universe getting filled up with Pink Goo - the ultimate crime, something to be stopped at any cost.

-Green Goo is goo deliberately released, for example by ecoterrorists, in order to stop the spread of Pink Goo, either by sterilization or simply by digesting the pink goo. Some form of this, along with an antidote available to the selected few, has been suggested as a strategy for achieving zero population growth.

Edited by Cossack, 07 September 2006 - 02:11 AM.

[MSpencer]

Unfortunately, they're little machines, meaning with the processing power of a computer from the 1980s and the programming only to replicate under certain conditions, they cannot consume the universe.
Furthermore, there's a limited biomass on this planet, which restricts the number of organisms. Similarly there is a limited mass of raw materials which restricts the number of machines.
While it sounds plausible, under deliberate thought it appears to be nothing more than sensationalistic fearmongering.

[duke_Qa]

yeah, for pink goo to thrive, you would need other goo types that creates nutrients out of raw materials that otherwise are useless for us.

unless there are other creatures in the universe that thrives on something that is the direct opposite of what we humans need, i don't see the big problem in us spreading all over the galaxy. kinda like the first algae on earth creating oxygen, we could be the fertilization for future lifeforms.

naturally, evolution/stupidity from our side would by that time have created something superior to man, and since the universe is a cold place, we would probably be extinct and not able to reap the fruits of our labour.



on another topic, just got back from a lecture where we had one of our countrys more wellknown visionaries about future technology. he talked alot about the internet and old science fiction that foresaw how this technology could be used, but he also talked about virtual reality.

he was more into the idea of external things like a suit that gives off resistance depending on what you did in the virtual world, grabbing an apple would make a suit that you wear go rigid in the hand, and emulate the feeling of coldness and the skin of the apple.

the eyes would have implanted some sort of visual unit that you could navigate by looking and double-blinking, which he made a bit of fun of naturally("if my students starts double blinking alot during my lectures, i have to go and have a talk with them").

he also took up an important thing that i believe will be somehow a major part of virtual reality as it is of the Internet today... i don't think i even need to mention it by any of its names for you to understand the topic. he didnt go into the topic too deep thoug. He was more interested in how the retired people would escape the reality, of them being put inside a morgue-ish drawer that would connect them to a virtual reality, where they would be appearing as young avatars on a beach in the Carribeans or anywhere else.
and there they would try not to think that the person next to themselves might be Mrs. Josephine Charleston the widow at the age of 84, which lies in the drawer next to you


he also said that virtual reality would be for this century what the movies was for the last century. i have to say that his vision would then be a bit like the old black and white movies taken during ww2. you won't get proper virtual reality before you have something akin to the matrix imo. any virtual reality where you have to move your body to interact with virtual things will never really be any realistic.