21–30 of 44 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disturbing, yes. But keep in mind that there are warehouses out there with people's heads cryogenically frozen. So there's a line of people queuing up, waiting for it to happen. :)
That may be true, but I was under the impression that cryogenic thawing wasn't necessarily a foolproof operation. That would seem to be to be the first step.
More exciting than the moon landing or the Facebook IPO!
Why is "reducing air pollution" a potential application of driverless cars? The other benefits allow people to driver faster and safer on the same amount of roads, but I don't see how that would encourage less driving that would lead to less air pollution. Faster driving = less gas mileage, and if driverless cars dramatically lowers the opportunity cost of driving people may be encouraged to put even more miles on th…
Self-driving cars could form convoys to utilize slipstream. You could reduce the safety distance, because the reaction time compared to a human driver is massively reduced. Additionally, the driving style of the average driver leaves a lot of room for improvement.
Have we hit a wall on increasing high temperature superconductors or is their graph out of date?
This should be a great source of inspiration for any budding scifi author.
rec.arts.sf.* would be able to give book titles, authors, and probably page numbers too.
It'd be interesting to keep the article to read it in 5 / 10 / 50 years.
Why is "reducing air pollution" a potential application of driverless cars? The other benefits allow people to driver faster and safer on the same amount of roads, but I don't see how that would encourage less driving that would lead to less air pollution. Faster driving = less gas mileage, and if driverless cars dramatically lowers the opportunity cost of driving people may be encouraged to put even more miles on th…
Self-driving cars could form convoys to utilize slipstream. You could reduce the safety distance, because the reaction time compared to a human driver is massively reduced. Additionally, the driving style of the average driver leaves a lot of room for improvement.
Also note that self-driven cars can park themselves and shut off the engine to avoid congestion instead of simply sitting in a slow-moving queue at a "metering light".
Any of the genetic/medical things will (IMHO) have annoyingly slow progress. The body is an incredibly complex system (duh), one I think that will defy efforts to "reverse engineer" is (so to speak).
Put it this way: we need massive amounts of computing power just to figure out the shape of proteins, which is important to figure out what they react to and how. Extending that to figuring out the interactions and it gets even more complicated.
I also believe that nothing will replace the convenience of (largely) non-volatile fuels to the point where considerable effort will be spent to make artificial fuels viable. Giant tubs of algae making them, fuel trees (Anathem), that sort of thing.
As much as I like the idea of a space elevator, I'm not sure how viable it is. Firstly, just to create a material strong enough to withstand the forces involved is still something largely theorized about (buckeyballs notwithstanding). It will also be incredibly costly to produce. Imagine what acts of terror could do to that.
I see the future of mass long-distance travel being underground vacuum trains. It's a huge engineering effort but would solve so many problems (eg air congestion, travel times).
And as much as it depresses me I don't see a big future in space. The economics are terrible (particularly for interstellar travel). IIRC I read that getting one ton of spacecraft to the nearest star system accelerating to 10% of the speed of light would require roughly 10^18 joules of energy or roughly 1kg (being 0.1% of the total mass) of matter being converted to energy perfectly. And this assumes you've solved the reaction mass problem.
It's interesting to note that GPGPU is on there but general-purpose computation on FPGAs isn't. It amazes me how the former has taken so much mindshare.
I like FPGAs too though and am definitely egging them on, but winning may involve somehow smuggling them into something mass produced, which may be a problem since mass produced hardware will usually prefer an ASIC. We will see.
The lady with the arm has a 96 electrode implant.. you could probably type with that many electrodes.
Seems to me its just a matter of getting more electrodes in there and/or doing more training in order to be able to interface with an exocortex.
I think if people are less afraid of sticking things in their brains, things would look a lot more like a cyberpunk novel already.