What sci-fi-esque inventions are the most plausible and could happen soonest?
What sci-fi-esque inventions are the most plausible and could happen soonest?
we need teleportation frankly
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- Big uptick in the amount of human activity in space — tech there already, economy starting to manifest it. Like 10,000 humans in space at any given time, then 100,000, then 1,000,000, and so on
- If we can get a slightly lighter solar sail material, that’s the last missing tech piece needed to send probes to Alpha Centauri. We’d need massive laser arrays so tech alone would precede economic manifestation by a while. Human laser-accelerated probes can reach 0.3 c, and arrive at the star in about 15 years. The probe’s design is the size of a thumb drive
- AI is obviously making big strides
- honestly my thumbs are cramping up, but there’s lots more. drone-v-drone warfare, all semi-autonomous
- Growing perfect genetic match organs to implant
- mRNA delivered by microplasmids is incredible. There are easily a million life-enhancing distinct uses of it that involve temporarily building any protein we want in a patient’s cells, endogenously, with controlled expression. That is crazy powerful technology
- Fusion power’s like almost there. I think we’re at the “now scale it” phase
- Bombarding Earth by hurling containers full of rocks out of railgun launch tubes on the moon
- Sex robots
- Translating to and from animal languages
- Cloning, which has existed for decades now, is somehow totally invisible to media attention. Like, in the time since Dolly the sheep was in the headlines, someone could have theoretically produced an actual army of human clones and have them hidden somewhere
- Telepathy via neural implants
That’s some of the sci fi stuff we either have now and just are too harried and exhausted to contemplate, or that we’re just on the verge of creating.
translating animal languages
"How to Use AI to Talk to Whales—and Save Life on Earth With ecosystems in crisis, engineers and scientists are teaming up to decipher what animals are saying. Their hope: By truly listening to nature, humans will decide to protect it."
It's a good idea. Forming relationships with other animal species, interpersonal relationships, will accelerate their assimilation into this civilization.
It's a soild model for how to incentivize resource allocation. As we've seen with ghetto after ghetto, if there's a wall between two populations and neither side communicates across that wall, the relationships go away and savagery becomes possible.
Communication with animals is a really good idea, if we want to save the animals. Of course, by communicating with the animals we're sort of ending their existence as animals. But oh well. Even the Mona Lisa's falling apart.