Can you think of 10 highly advanced future technology that won't appear for at least 100 years?
- Thread starter Maximum7
- Start date
- Fusion power (a commercially feasible reactor will still be 30 years away)
- Cloaking technology over a large frequency range (microwave through UV) at the macrolevel (larger than a few centimetres)
- Brain state uploading and simulation (brain augmentation by machines will be possible)
- Quantum computers with more than a few hundred qubits
- Widespread use of personal flying devices with autonomous or nonautonomous control (likely possible but will be illegal because of security concerns)
- Superbright AIs (more intelligent and faster than human minds)
- The Singularity
I expect I'll be proved wrong on at least one, if not several, of these guesses.
C
Captain pl1ngpl0ng
Guest
- A Force field made of massless particles that can deflect objects.
A star drive - of any kind - will still be at least 100 years off...
I don't know - if the Mach drive (exploiting the Woodward effect) proves viable, travelling to the stars at a substantial percentage of light speed might be attainable. Also, if it is possible to strip electrons of their virtual photon clouds and their bare mass proves to be negative, construction of wormholes and warp drives might be feasible. Causality might suffer badly, however...
Last edited:
Sadly, I predict that we won't bother, at least not for a long, long time. We'll almost certainly move out into our own solar system, but virtualization will cause us to turn inward. Your great-great-grandchildren will exist inside a server. Not mind transferrence. They'll be "born" there.
Why? They will be the children of the avatars built from the pattern of your great-grandchild's DNA. They will have lineage with us, just like children always have, just in a new way. I can think of some horrible implications - but none that are worse than things that are coming in meatspace: genetically tailored viruses that target an individual, family, race, or other genetic marker. Anti-matter weapons. Firearms printed on demand. Famine and war from overpopulation. And so on.That's a scary thought.
They will be largely free of many of the things that plague us: Death, unless they want to die. Hunger - they can eat the pattern of whatever they want, or not eat at all if they choose. Limitations of physical space. Love triangles: if someone really loves two incompatible people that much, they can fork themselves and be with both. Limitations of body: spend 150 years being a lamppost just to see what it's like, if that tickles your fancy. Fork yourself and do that AND live 100 other lives, too. Divide your server allocation and build your own universe - be a god.
I think this is actually what happens to the civilizations of a lot of intelligent species. It's why we've never met or seen definite signs of any. Why go out to explore the universe when you can have an ever-growing multiverse in your own solar system? A lot probably even forget that's where they are once they're deep enough in. Maybe even forget to plan to leave before their star dies/expands.
^We could always siphon some mass off the Sun to make it last longer. That would also take care of global warming and the Sun's luminosity increasing while on the Main Sequence.
I agree with you - true spacefaring (even inter-star system) technology won't really advance until there is a real practical need for it (and no - overpopulation won't be it as they're easier solutions for that; and nature may even take care of it in a nasty way). It'll be a need for some vital manufacturing resource that can no longer can be found on Earth but is available from the Moon/Mars/Asteriod belt, etc. IE there won't be real progress until there's a real/pressing/critical need. That's just the way humanity is.
The U.S. got to the moon in a decade because someone decided the U.S. needed to show itself a technologically superior to the U.S.S.R. at the time. Any real science developed of conducted was a secondary concern. It was all one big Cold War tpeen publicity stunt - and we did it multiple times just so everyone else could see - "No it wasn't a fluke, we have the ability to do this reliably - yes, our tech is THAT good."
-Dyson spheres
-The ability to use quantum entanglement in any sort of a practical way.
-The ability to use quantum entanglement in any sort of a practical way.
That prediction is already wrong - for example, quantum computers and quantum encryption rely on entanglement. There also applications in time keeping, microscopy and animal navigation (this latter example being a natural product of evolution that we could potentially emulate for practical use).
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scie...ical-uses-spooky-quantum-mechanics-180953494/
Entanglement might also be exploited by photosynthesis.
https://www.insidescience.org/news/scientists-capture-spooky-action-photosynthesis
Last edited:
