A lot of black mirror stuff.
Apologies for the blanket pessimism but the last decades darkened my view.
Vaccines. Maybe in 100 years we’ll even be able to eliminate measles…again.
external gestation…a womb with a view
severe genetic manipulation… designer babies
digit/limb/organ regeneration
They just released a story about removing the gene that causes down syndrome. Pretty huge
Seems entirely reasonable that a Gattaca future is achievable. Whether desirable is the other question. Somewhere CJ Cherryh is being worshipped as a prophet.
Artificial wombs are something that’s often presented as dystopian, but I would imagine would actually be a very good thing. Beyond the obvious help it would be to infertile couples that desired children, they would if commonly adopted eliminate the danger of birth and pregnancy complications, and discomfort associated with the process. Probably not everyone would want to use it, but I’d bet even having the option would mean a lot to a lot of people.
The real downside to artificial wombs is that we may rapidly become dependent on them. Half of pregnancies result in spontaneous abortion. With external gestation that assumedly wouldn’t happen. That’s a hell of a lot of evolutionary pressure which could have all kinds of consequences.
And then all of this gave birth to the terrorists known as the Naturalists™…
living in a self-sustaining ecological-aware community that values freedom and diversity and everyone having their needs met
I saw something about a city in India being super eco-friendly. I’m not sure what was the name of the city, but it looks like they have a few.
Robocop Bell Riots suppression?
Tricorders, cellphones are already partway there they just need more durable, small sensors like a handheld light spectrometer to tell what things are made of and a handheld interferometer to detect gravity
Check out the app Phyphox, it uses all your existing sensors and probably surpasses tricorders in several ways while, of course, lacking in a few others.
I can detect gravity without a device:
Jump off a roof. If you hit the ground, you’ve detected gravity.
You could just raise your arm and let it loose…
Exoskeletons like Ripley’s in Alien. We’ve got smaller ones, but I want to pilot a walking fork lift.
Pipe dream - battlemechs aka mechwarrior (not pacific rim). Very impractical but I want one anyway. Yes, I saw the robot fighting league by Megabots. I have their poster.
I’ve seen prototypes of these that were very impressive since like a decade ago, so I’m fully expecting those to be here soon. Power supply usually is the biggest issue
Fast-refresh ePaper. I just want a laptop I can use outside, man!
Look up Daylight DC-1 might be what you are looking for
Oooohhh, thank you
They exist as monitors. In videos they kind of look like really early crappy LCD screens.
I’d just sit in the shade.
I remember we could use the game boy advance SP outside. Is this screen technology used for PC?
Artificial stem cells seem like the next thing to really revolutionize medicine.
Quantum computers for brute force hacks seems doable in 100.
Eye tracking pointer devices will likely be more convenient than mice within a dozen or two years. This will probably be widely available for people who are paralyzed first.
Diamond processors are always 10 years away, but I think we can do it in 100. This would revolutionize the amount of power we can put through a chip without worrying about cooling.
Quick charge capacitor replacements for standard rechargble batteries
Low yield fusion plants. I’d like to think of them as capable of high yield, but it’s much harder than initially thought. Some ideas are quite promising for low yield.
The eye tracking stuff exists already. There are medical device companies that build and sell these things.
I feel like the bottleneck will be with smooth continuous motions. It’s very easy to move a cursor in that way with a mouse but you can’t do that motion with your eyes unless you are looking at something else that’s moving.
Fair. Check this out. The existing stuff is pretty cool https://youtu.be/CP3t8qMHcsM
Most of the stuff in Jules Verne’s books, even Paris in the Twentieth Century.
(Well, the moon gun would need to be a very long railgun, not a gunpowder cannon, if you want crewed capsules, but still.)
Sex robots!
I’d really like to at least see humanity fully switch to clean energy in my lifetime but I’m losing hope.
I should already be able to take a self-driving flying taxi to work. I should already be able to vacation on the moon. We shouldn’t be burning stuff to power all our modern tech.
I grew up on 80s/90s scifi. I hope humanity can get it’s shit together and that the current anti-intellectualism phase we’re in is just part of a larger cycle.
Flying taxis won’t happen, way too many risks, even in the future, never mind the horrors of having your skies full of that crap.
We have auto-pilots for planes, those are mostly fine. People are the problem. I dont trust humans to operate motor vehicles in 2 dimensions, let alone 3…
To be fair, you have a 1 in 95 chance of dying in an automobile accident.
Based on modern safety standards for everything else, that’s unacceptable.
If I offered you a job and said you have a 1 in 95 chance of dying from working this job, you would refuse. The most dangerous job in the USA is logging, with about a 1 in 1000 chance of dying. More lumberjacks die driving home than die working their extremely dangerous job.
Not only should we have self-driving flying taxis by now, but we should also at least have level 5 self-driving cars so people aren’t constantly dying driving to get groceries or pick up their kids.
No
What we need is more bicycle roads, pedestrian walk ways and public transportation
Suffice to say that 1 bus is safer than 30 cars but it also generates a shit tonne less pollution, but also keep in mind that the vast majority of car rides are short distance, even in the US
In the Netherlands they changed everything to prefer bicycles and walking and it’s noticable. It changed architecture. It’s why in the Netherlands there are broad loads of small super markets. Wherever you are within a town you’ll have a super market at walking distance
Many people there don’t have a car, not because they can’t afford it but because they don’t want one. Cars are expensive, cumbersome, dangerous, and ugly. You won’t see depressing towns there that are 70% concrete roads or parking lots. It’s all beautiful because they got rid of all that, it isn’t needed.
In before anyone starts about how this can’t be done in the US: it can, and quite easily. Pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure costs a fraction of car infrastructure, it’s easier and faster to build, no parking lots required, you can now make that a store and get taxes from it, it’ll make your cities richer. People get more exercise, they’ll be healthier and happier, there are no downsides. Inclines near mountainous areas? Electrical bikes to the rescue.
Please please do NOT push this car stuff, especially flying car stuff. It’s not needed, it’s a waste, it’s polluting even when electric, and we have flying cars, they’re called planes and there is a reason why pilots need to learn and train a LOT more than car drivers.
Sure. I agree with all of that. But I live in a suburban sprawl of a US city that is just dense enough to have lots of cars, but nowhere near dense enough to have decent public transportation…unless we as a society decided to bulldoze this entire vast suburban landscape and start over with density as a goal. It’s hot here too. Nobody is riding their bike 12 miles to work in 95⁰ weather (35⁰ for our metric homies).
Maybe within the next few years the Netherlands will let me and my family in as refugees so I can bike everywhere on a 72⁰ summer day.
But I like where your head’s at. Hopefully you’re young and can make a difference.
I don’t think auto pilot works how you seem to think it does…
Obviously I know how they work, I saw it in a documentary about Airplanes. The Otto pilot inflates at the press of a button (or is inflated manually) and they fly the plane.
I suspect we will see a human brain to digital interface. I don’t think it will be “downloading minds” or anything, but I could see someone finding a way to plug a specialized camera or mic in to have a full functioning robotic replacement part.
I’m pretty sure they already have the beginning pieces to this, but its too specialized and expensive to do anything commercial with it yet.
This is so terrifying to me. I feel like it’ll end up like the Black Mirror episode with the subscription model, getting more and more expensive with fewer features.
Common People
That episode made my wife and I really hope this tech never becomes a thing.
Cochlear implants are a form of this, and are already commercial. I remember having a conversation with a guy at a doof about 10 years ago, standing right near a loud sound system, and it took me 20 minutes to realise he had one. He was completely deaf without it on… I can only assume the tech is much better these days.
Similar things exist for vision (though maybe not yet commercial?).
bsg, sga all had the brain interface thing going on. especially the cylon part was all about that.
We currently carry tricorders in our pockets. I can see a medical tricorder being ubiquitous for field medics, ships, and the like within 100 years.
Railguns, there already exist prototypes that destroy themselves. So close!
I thought we already had rail guns on ships?
No. Well kinda.
The Ford class uses what is basically a rail gun to launch planes but big navy decided against continuing development on railguns as a weapon.
