Why Don't We Invent That Tomorrow?

museumpeace writes "In the NYTimes book review blog, David Itzkoff takes a look at a new book devoted to predicting which 'science fiction' technologies may really fly some day. The author is Michio Kaku, one of the inventors of string theory, so he bears a hearing. His picks include light sabers, invisibility and force fields." Which sci-fi tech do you think needs to get invented over the weekend?

Von Neumann Machines

[susano_otter]

Seriously.

At any scale. But nanoscale is my preference.

Ideally of types that interface cleanly with the human nervous system.

But that's just me.

Teleporters

[Opportunist]

Duh. Anyone who has to drive to work on Mondays will want one.

More weapons??

[Izabael_DaJinn]

Guns and sabers. That's not a very innovative future.

And invisibility? Nothing good would come of that either.

I'd be happy for a cure for the cold personally.

Obligatory

[Bryansix]

Where is my flying car?
But seriously I think that we should invent a real HUD system that could work through contacts but be powered just with body heat.

Mr.Fusion

[gmuslera]

Seems to not break any phisical law (?) and will have a good impact in... well, anything not related with the oil industry.

Re:That's an easy one!

[The Ancients]

I think if we can work out the logistics of time travel, the other three dimensions shouldn't provide too much of an issue.

My pick

[geekoid]

unaging.
Physically staying 27 until I die from something other then natural causes.

Re:Kaku bears a hearing?

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

I remember reading his book Hyperspace as a teenager and getting really irked by his repeated and fairly unrealistic visions of godlike power in the near future (an irritation at least one Amazon reviewer shares).

Ah, the delusion of grandure. I do agree that futurologists are guilty of this - but what we have even today is really quite grand.

What he's doing though seems to me to be mere extrapolation. Let us go back a few thousand years and try to explain to your average hunter/gatherer that in the future we have an arrow which can shoot all the way around the world and completely obliterate 50 square miles of whatever we aimed it at. That's pretty godlike, and that kind of technology came along with the microwave oven and color television.

The hunters arrow creates a hole a few inches in diameter - the hydrogen bomb creates a crater many hundreds of meters in diameter, so a weapon of a few thousand years from now should be able to create a blemish in matter approximately 1000 miles in size, a few thousand years past that and the weapon would make a big hole almost 6 million miles in size.

thousands of years are not long periods of time to the universe, I won't continue to extrapolate into the millions of years of humanities progress.

I think, if we survive and continue to progress like this, that we will be pretty bad-ass indeed.

Re:That's an easy one!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh? So at what speed is the earth moving? To answer that, we need to know the speed of Earth around the Sun (we do). We need to know the speed of the Sun around the galaxy (we do). We need to know the speed of the galaxy around the... what? Basically, you are proposing the existence of a "center of the universe".

Most likely, time travel keeps your current inertial frame of reference.

Re:That's an easy one!

[bluefoxlucid]

Absolute positioning is a myth. Think about motion and momentum for a while and you'll get it.

I endorse the above post.

[Valdrax]

Michio Kaku's predictions on technology frequently make me wonder just how good of a grasp he actually has on physics. My favorite is the old article where he predicts the way to escape the heat death of the universe by sending "atom-sized" nanomachines through a wormhole into a parallel universe where these machines would spread in a sphere at nearly light speeds.

Oh sure... we'll just ignore how something the size of an atom is supposed to contain any sort of parts capable of manipulating the environment as well as how they're supposed to encode information and make decisions. Might as well also ignore where such a machine is getting the energy to spread at light speed. Heck, why don't we just ignore reality entirely and get into exercises of sheer mental wankery, and...

Never mind, I keep forgetting he's a string theorist. Exercises in mental wankery that have no real attachment to physical reality is his bread and butter.

Re:That's an easy one!

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh. There is no "point" of the big bang. It was an explosion OF space, not an explosion IN space. Thus, the original point of the big bang is wherever you are, because that point _became_ spacetime.

Cheap abundant energy.

[WolF-g]

Near free, safe, energy. There's lots of it around, need better access to it.

At last!

[DynaSoar]

Finally, a /. article for which the mention of golly gee whiz SciFi stuff in the summary isn't a gratuitous insert. Kaku really talks about this stuff. Rationally.

Parts of the book relating to wormholes, time travel and teleportation have been adapted by Kaku himself and published in the March 2008 ("Special Einstein") issue of Discover magazine. You can get an unadulterated taste of the book and a bunch of other nifty stuff about Einstein, relativity and such all in one package.

I think the claim he was an inventor of string theory isn't entirely accurate. However, he was co-author of the first paper on string field theory, which showed the five versions of string theory to be different versions of the same underlying mechanism. I think "rescurer" would be more accurate than "inventor" as well as being worth more credit.

Despite publishing other popular books previously including a best seller, hosting a 4 part BBC special, a 3 part Discovery Channel special and two different weekly radio shows, he's so far managed to dodge the inevitable unwashed masses and supposedly washed whiny insiders who show up to tip the ivory tower of popularizers of science. Last time it was Brian Greene. Even Sagan was so assailed until he forced their forgiveness by dying at them. Let's see how Kaku weathers the storm following the massive attention this new book is getting him. Including one picture of the Stargate and one of a Kirk led landing party being beamed down in the Discover article should help bring them out of the woodwork.

ZPM

[rossdee]

Obviously we need new souces of energy to replace fossil fuels. Zero Point energy seems to be a good choice. I don't expect that we could get a ZPM small enough to carry around in your hands like they do on atlantis, but something the size of a bus would be good enough.

Re:That's an easy one!

[MttJocy]

I see another problem here, lets presume I could materialize on the surface of earth at this altitude, longitude and latitude at some arbitrary date I would also need to materializing there with the same momentum as the body in question otherwise I am going to appear stationary and be rapidly accelerated by gravity towards a body which is approaching me at a massive speed enough I would imagine to completely obliterate my body, if we were talking earth it would be traveling towards you or away from you at a rate of up to 30km/s if you were stationary and did not possess the momentum we all have by being on earth normally it would be somewhat painful I imagine.

I got one.

[polyomninym]

I know this is so far out, but how about FOOD for HUNGRY PEOPLE. 3 words Duke Nukem Forever;)

Re:Kaku bears a hearing?

[MttJocy]

The worst thing about such talk of weapons is that natural law shows us that weapons able to destroy entire solar systems in a single blast and send radiation out over massive areas are entirely possible (see supernova) all that is required is enough energy which would probably make such a device absolutely massive.

Although someone developing technology which could cause a star to enter prematurely into its death phase by interrupting its normal reactions could possibly be smaller (especially if a chain reaction was involved) which could be a devastating but fairly easy to carry weapon if someone was out for interstellar war with someone.

Re:That's an easy one!

[SQLGuru]

Is it a safe assumption that we have never been in the same place twice? Even with the variables that we know, how many other orbits / vectors are we following? Assuming some universal coordinate system origin, I would almost believe that Earth has never been at the same coordinates since the birth of the universe.....and might not until the death of the universe.

Layne

Re:That's an easy one!

[kallisti]

I can't remember any teleportation or time travel story that mentions this obvious thing.

The tabletop RPG Traveller took all of this into account. It was possible (although very unlikely) to get abilities like teleportation, but the rules were so hard-assed about the actual physics to make it practically useless. For instance, it calculated the amount of potential energy that you get from teleporting up or down in Earth gravity. This was assumed to be applied to you as a near instant change in body temperature which meant in the end that any attempt to actually go much faster than the stairs would cook your brain.

Not to mention getting slammed by a wall of you tried to teleport too far across a planet. The weirdest mix of science and pseudo-science since the golden age of comics.

Moved and seconded...

[Jane Q. Public]

I vote with the two above. Wake me up when the String Hypothesis actually earns the name "theory"!

Re:Teleporters

[ampathee]

Depends on whether it's a wormhole type teleport, or the type where it vapourizes you then recreates you somewhere else. I'd use the former, but I wouldn't go near the latter.

Re:That's an easy one!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because you can string words into sentences that are grammatically correct doesn't mean that your sentences they actually mean something.

Re:My pick

[MorePower]

Why would you need to be allowed to retire. I'm going to retire as soon as I have enough money invested to live on the interest plus some extra to grow the principle enough to offset inflation each year. That's well before "official" retirement age, which is good considering how few of my male relatives even lived to their sixties.

It's not even really hard to save up that money, the key seems to be "don't have kids", which would be even more important in a world with immortality.

Broiled tongue in cheek.

[alfredo]

Which sci-fi tech do you think needs to get invented over the weekend?

A Windows release that actually works as advertised.

Re:That's an easy one!

[RiotingPacifist]

But in the earth coorinate system, were always in the same place.

People are quite happy to accept that we cant travel faster that c, but soon forget that all frames of reverance are all equal. There is no aether, no absolute position, no zero velocity, hell there aint much apart from acceleration!

Re:Lightsabers...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mall Ninja [lonelymachines.org], is that you?