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?

Easy: Method of Locomotion to another Solar System

[MrPerfekt]

No other advance would ever be as important as a quick way between the stars for colonization of other places in the galaxy. It would change our world so much indirectly just by us having the ability to leave it.

Re:That's an easy one!

[EEPROMS]

The problem with time travel is although it may be possible to travel in time it would not be a good idea. Let me explain, if have an actual time machine and travel back lets say 1 week you would materialize millions of miles away from earth in the middle of deep space. The reason for this becomes obvious when you realise earth is actually moving through space faster than a speeding bullet thus totally stuffing up the usefulness of traveling through time.

Re:Kaku bears a hearing?

[CheshireCatCO]

I had a similar response to Hyperspace (although my specific irritations are lost in the mists of bad memory and over a decade of time). Honestly, I'm not really inclined to give a special weight to an inventor of String Theory anyway; I'm very unimpressed with the scientific merits of that theory and I rather feel it borders on a non-science.

Re:Lightsabers...

[bladesjester]

As a swordsman, may I just say first that I'd want one and second, that most people would probably cut their own heads/arms/random other body parts off with them... lol

Sounds like a win to me all around *grin*

Re:String Theory

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

You might be closer to the truth than you intended to be. [mayanmajix.com]

Of course, this smacks of urban legendry - but snopes nor wikipedia seem to offer definite refutations, just lack of support.

Screw that, I want space colonies

[Quattro Vezina]

Read High Frontier, by Gerard O'Neill. Space colonies are perfectly feasible. Building one is more an exercise in putting existing technologies together than inventing new technologies.

I want to live in an O'Neill cylinder!

Stop Aging

[localman]

Out of all the tech that could be made, this is the only one that allows you to see all the tech that could be invented down the line. Time has become to me my most precious and scarce resource. By the time I've got things worked out well enough to really be great, I'll have very little time left. I could easily enjoy 500 years of life. Beyond that I can't say for sure, but I'd like to see.

I predict that at some point in the distant future, the idea that people let themselves die when they didn't really want to will be considered absurd. To the degree that it is possible for us to solve aging, our current apathy about it is a little like voluntary genocide. Of course there are certain odd implications when people can live as long as they like, but population scaling is something we have to deal with in any case.

People are working on this, the notion of the afterlife (just about the most tenuous fairy-tale idea I can imagine) keeps us from really making it a priority.

(I realize that solving current diseases and war and such are just as important and in the same vein, but we're talking outlandish tech here.)

Cheers.

Re:Lightsabers...

[Captain DaFt]

Here's a real, functional light saber that can be built with todays tech:

  Take a high-powered infra-red laser that can be focused with a lens so that the focal point is energetic enough to ionize air.

Now get a lens whose focus can be changed electrically (Quartz and germanium are two possibilities that come to mind, I know germanium is transparent to infrared, not too sure about quartz)

Put laser and lens in a handle, sweep the focus of the lens from just past the hilt out to about three feet and back, several times a second.

Voila! Nice hissing, glowing column of energy that looks like a sword, cuts like a plasma torch, and can be yielded with one hand.

Caveats: Beams wont block other beams like a real sword.
                  Wear safety goggles to protect remaining eye from laser.
                  Please just ignore the power cable running to the wall outlet.
PS, if you're silly enough to do this, please post video of mishaps on You Tube AND Darwin Awards!

Re:Michio Kaku and Discovery

[AKAImBatman]

Michio Kaku hosted a series of documentaries from Discovery Channel, among them is 2057 The city.

Now that you mention it, I remember seeing that episode. It was absolutely terrible.

"Base code so old that no one remembers how to modify it?" Apparently, the host knows absolutely nothing about how large scale software projects are managed, and how incredibly fragile they become when not actively maintained. And even if we accept his premise, I think you'll find that "The City" (SPOOOOON!) would have patched against those ancient vulnerabilities decades ago. No one is going to leave an entire city unpatched against an active worm.

And don't even get me started about the level of "The City's" integration. The kid just pops his shark into a billboard and it manages to make its way across hundreds of disparate systems into "The City's" primary mainframe? That must be some impressive code to run on so many platforms, exploiting the exact same vulnerability at every turn! And yet the virus is somehow constrained to "The City" even though it's being passed along the Internet? If it was really so virulent, wouldn't nearly every city in the world be affected?

Oh, that's right. He used his momma's security codes. That makes complete sense. Not. Because I really trust a cop with complete access to "The City's" systems? Maybe, just maybe, she might have been restricted to only systems she needs access to? Even if we assume she occasionally needs increased access, one would think there would be a procedure in place to provide only temporary access upon request and approval from a superior. Otherwise, what's to prevent Joe Badguy from kidnapping a cop, torturing her for the passcodes, then taking over "The City" before anyone can stop him?

Really stupid show. /rant

Re:That's an easy one!

[mpeskett]

We can slow down time already, by moving really fast. The difficult bit is moving backwards or forwards in a discrete step. I suppose you could use relativistic speed to go forward in time - shoot off around the place for a year, come back and find more time has passed than you had to sit through, but it's not quite time travel as envisioned by sci-fi.

Re:Kaku bears a hearing?

[fmobus]

Not that simple, I believe. Impacted area increases in a quadratic manner (remember A = PI.r^2). It is very likely that the energy needed to blast that area/volume is on higher polynomial (ie, being a r^4 or r^5). Much like getting a spaceship near c, there is a point where energy requirements get prohibitive.

Unfortunately our potential has limitations. There is just so much energy we can extract from our environment (read: sun). Maybe our best shot is building something like a dyson killer star [xkcd.com]

Re:Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

The University of Washington is working on HUD contacts powered by Radio Frequency. Popular Mechanics has a brief article in their latest issue: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health_medicine/4252012.html [popularmechanics.com]

Re:That's an easy one!

[Cal Paterson]

Do you know what a troll is? The grandparent was not a troll. If you're looking for a generic insult for use on the internet, I not only suggest "n00b"; but also that you go back to playing Unreal Championship. While /. doesn't have the highest standards in the world, I think we're above the most blatant name-calling methods.

Re:That's an easy one!

[EEPROMS]

On the surface your statement seems plausible until you sit down and think about all the variables of motion in the other dimensions one has to compensate for. Lets ignore for starters such things as the earth doesn't circle the earth in a circular motion but in a uneven oval. We shall also for now ignore other other quirks like the Sun circling the galaxy whilst entering and leaving the galactic plane, bit like a horse going around a merry-go-round going up and down in the verticle while circling in the horizontal plane, no lets just look at our planet and those variables. Now you have to materialise at a point in space and time on the planet (ignoring the few million other galactic variables) and not in the middle of a moving car,bird, building etc. Basically you could only travel through time and land on a spot on earth were you "know" beyond a doubt no life has ever been because otherwise it would be too risky (russian roulette). Just think about that, you would have to have a perfect understanding of all the variables of all objects moving on the surface of the planet earth before hand, we cant even keep a correct report of what is happening today let alone years later (the future being impossible to judge). So now we wont be able to compensate for the other dimensions unless "you become a god like being" that has knowledge of all the moving variables not just of our planet but the universe.

Re:Stop Aging

[Oligonicella]

"To the degree that it is possible for us to solve aging, our current apathy about it is a little like voluntary genocide."

I'm pretty familiar with the topic and you're simply wrong. There's no apathy and there's not a lot of progress. Unless you have some new research I'm unfamiliar with and could provide a link?

Re:That's an easy one!

[repapetilto]

Ok... so theres a couple of ways to get around such things while still staying scientifically consistent.

1) Traveling backwards in time by going faster than the speed of light you know [(1-v^2/c^2)^.5] (will take infinite energy, but were talking time travel so lets hand-wave that away... maybe you get it back on the return trip or something). So first youve got your machine that can speed you up that fast, also for the sake of argument lets say the force you can generate is so large that you get to the speed of light in less than planck time (the first trick), thereby not interacting with anyone or traveling anywhere before you lose all mass and travel at light speed. From there, if you think about it (to avoid the root of a negative), the direction that light travels must switch, so once again youd be traveling through time at the same speed as now relative to earth and at the same location, only everything would be running opposite. So what you wanna do is once agian use your ultimate acceleration device but turn it on for a fraction of a second less, and this amount of time your accelerating is related to how far back in time you end up when you then decelerate to zero V relative to the earth, now youre at a point backwards in time relative to where you started, but if you try to interact with anything you'll have to do it all backwards, and plus you're not in the right spot which just isnt going to be fun. So heres the second trick, now you once again accelerate to lightspeed and a little bit beyond really quickly. Now youre in the past traveling in the direction of causality as we know it, but in the wrong spot( probably the middle of nowhere, you can check this by sending some smaller time machines ahead of you programemd to come back that can sense the surroundings) so you just travel through space until you get to where you want, and now you do whatever it is you wanted to do back there.

2)You don't actually go back in time, but a copy of you does. If the state of every subatomic particle in your body could be detected very near to the time before youre sent back, you wouldnt know the difference. So we take that information, compress it in some way (your DNA is basically a compressed human being, think about that), then send that signal through a microscopic wormhole moving at relativistic speeds relative to its nearby partner who you keep in a safe location, with some way for it to decompress itself. When you exited the slow moving partner you would end up in the same location but in the past.

Re:That's an easy one!

[nschubach]

I think if you could do that, most people would be too busy transporting their DNA all over the galaxy exploring all the habitable planets before time travel. What would your copy do? If it could send itself back, how/would you determine who shall remain alive or do you continue to infinitely clone yourself. Could this give way to the religious belief that somehow humans did start from thin air? Were Adam and Eve copies of an alien race who figured out how to transport their DNA signature to this planet to continue their race on a distant planet?

I think "alternate universes" could probably be explained with time/space warping though. They may not be alternate universes, but alternate planets that happen to interfere with your little time warp phenomenon. That wouldn't really be time travel, but a "natural" form of transportation without destruction.

The question that begs to be asked for time travel though: If you do travel back in time, and let's say you know exactly where you will end up. How do you get back? Let's say you build a device in the past (now present)... you've used resources from that time that could have been used for something else, creating the famous paradoxical situations. You could, by using a wrong plank of wood or stepping on a bug that might scare your ancestors into each others arms, change the course of your history, rendering you nonexistent. It would happen so fast, it would be like stepping off your time machine and vanishing into thin air. Along with your device. Not even mentioning airborne viruses that you could carry back with you.

True story

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

I was at a supercomputing conference in Oregon a few years back. Michio Kaku was the keynote speaker, talking about his predictions of fundamental limits on various technologies. He started spouting on about some semiconductor limit but as he was speaking there was a bit of a commotion coming from the back. Eventually it was revealed that there was a bunch of guys from some research lab disputing over whether or not to mention their latest work before making an official announcement. You see, they'd already broken Kaku's limit.

Re:That's an easy one!

[Kligat]

You have to take into account the Earth wobbling slightly about the Earth-Moon barycenter, the Earth orbiting the Sun, the Sun orbiting the barycenter of the Milky Way Galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy orbiting the barycenter of the Local Group while it is drawn to the Andromeda Galaxy, and the Local Group being drawn to the Virgo Cluster while it's probably moving about the Virgo Supercluster.

Physicists, say the ever reliable Wikipeda (it's okay to use it while mocking it if I check it's sources, right?) are still debating on a step-up from superclusters called a galaxy filament [wikipedia.org]. It makes me think that making sure Earth would be in the exact same space relative to everything else that influences its parent bodies' orbits would be almost as difficult as tracking the location of every object in the universe in the first place.

Since the Earth is moving at 30 km/s relative to the Sun, the Sun is moving at 240 km/s in a nearly circular orbit, and the Milky Way is moving at 100 km/s relative to the center of mass of the Local Group, maybe if you went back a day, you'd be 230 times the distance between Earth and the Moon, or half an AU, and since Warp Factor One in the original Star Trek series' inconsistent ship manual for the writers said that equals the speed of light, accounting for the location discrepancy would only take about 5 minutes, not taking into account the Virgo Supercluster, right?

Re:That's an easy one!

[bytesex]

Well, maybe you could use the earth's gravity then; you would step into your time travel vehicle, move back a second, fall back to earth, move back another second, fall back to earth again (or reposition yourself). If you do it quickly, you wouldn't notice, and you'd still be on earth when you arrived.

Re:Screw that, I want space colonies

[nicklott]

Possible, just insanely expensive. From the wiki wallah:

O'Neill's reference design ... consists of two counter-rotating cylinders each two miles (3 km) in radius, and twenty miles (30 km) long

I'm not going to do the maths, but you can imagine how much metal goes into a 3x20 mile long cylinder. Now imagine cutting that up into 20x5 metre sections and launching it into space. It might take a while.

I think we need to invent smelting in space before we can try these things, not to mention doing some proper research into closed ecosystems.

Re:No, not by itself

[jdigriz]

If the Go Fast Anywhere drive is magic, it can be like the spacefolding ships of Dune. No need for take-off and landing, just appear right on the surface of whatever planet you want to be on. Disappear from said planet the same way. Yeah, you'll need to find the planets first, but since you can Go Fast Anywhere, just spacefold to the near vicinity of the star and use a big radar dish, or synthetic array and telescopic observations to survey the system. No need for "magic star trek sensors", Arecibo works just fine in planetary radar mode, when it has funding. Spectroscopy and physical probes should suffice for the "analyze planets" part, once you're close enough. Yeah, it'll take a bit of time and multiple observations to work out the orbits, so you can predict where the planet will be so you can spacefold to that exact location, but it's not anywhere near impossible. Power sources? A Rickover-style nuclear plant should do fine for powering the electrical system of the ship, weight's not a real issue since we are spacefolding. That's assuming you can't tap whatever magical force powers the spacefold drive for ordinary power. Life support? We've been working with sealed environments for a while now. It's not tremendously difficult, assuming you don't spacefold to say, Venus, Jupiter or Io (radiation) or too close to a star. The relative velocity thing would not be a problem with spacefold drive, as we've seen that it matches velocity perfectly during the fold in the sequel novels because it is not smashed to bits by the planet it appears on.

So yeah, a properly dreamed-up magic Go Fast Anywhere drive would open up the galaxy. Implementation is left as an exercise for the reader.