For me it’s quantum computing - especially considering its impact on most current encryption methods
lab meat will be the norm for future generations
At that point, scientists might as well invent a way to produce concentrated nutrients.
Eat your pills Morty
Nature already did this. It’s called plants.
How would that work? Surely one periodic table chemical couldn’t singlehandedly convert itself into all the nutrients the body needs.
You’re right, you can’t. You need some additional stuff. Plants takes both CO2 from the air but they also need for instance nitrogen from the ground. Now, of course 80% of air is nitrogen but it’s bound up in an extremely stable state that plants can’t really use. It takes too much energy to break the bond. If we could find some way to extract nitrogen cheaply from air though, it would be a real game changer.
Why not just eat the plants?
Well plants do other stuff than only produce food, so I guess the idea is that it might be possible to produce food more efficiently than a plant does, which isn’t that far-fetched.
So it’s not “don’t eat plants” as much as “look, we made this bacteria that can produce a vegetable-soup with slightly more calories per energy input than a carrot”.
But then I want those drip-on perfect-emulation flavor drops from Shadowrun with my Nutrisoy!
Or one could make the food counterpart to the Flavor Up bottle.
Those really help the NERPS go down better. Yum!
honestly, just give me a sumptuous bean burger. I only eat kebabs because they’re cheap and available, not because I crave meat like a vampire
I crave meat like a vampire.
then you gotta problem there, bud
my teeth shake only if it’s there in front of me, otherwise I’m good
Anything decentralized and open source.
I’m really excited at the improvements made to gnome-mobile.
What about FOSS decentralised webpages, would that pick your interest?
Very much
What do you think about tenfingers.org ?
Never heard of it and it seems shady
🥲 It’s my protocol I have been working on for years.
Mind telling why it feels shady?
self hosted services that automatically and safely scale to global p2p services is about to happen
Any information about any of those things? I’m quite interested!
I’m the creator of a network protocol (and working implementation :-) that is based on self hosted nodes, that let’s you share/link to whatever data, say a html page, a video etc. Encrypted, overshared (so your node doesn’t need to be up for your data to be accessible), and decentralised. Based on reciprocal sharing so no money or luck involved.
I’m being bad at promoting it would be an understatement, I would love just contributing to all this obviously coming decentralised sharing.
Cheers
There has been a few attempts; zeronet and one from bittorent themselves that was dropped (I wonder what happened to that).
None of them have been used to create the killer app that has inspired the required network effect for mainstream usage. I guess finding the magic architecture that works and becomes sticky is the key. There are so many ways to do it!
Yup, that’s why I’m very excited about it
Regrowing teeth
Growing extra teeth
Cause why not right haha
Good news, there’s a trial starting soon.
Although they can’t guarantee the number and location of teeth regrown.
I’ll take two scoops please
In theory, we could make computers consume orders of magnitude less power, enabling extreme miniaturization of systems.
When I was learning computing on the electron level I was floored just how much electricity is wasted being converted to heat turning a 1 into a 0 and theorized that a system which would knock electrons around rather than just erasing them, cool to see it’s becoming a real thing.
I guess we can look forward to superconducting Light Emitting Capacitors that have 100% efficiency, with the unideal component being centralized on a thermoelectric unit to capture waste heat, since that was the other thing that I was successfully theorizing about at the time.
I still don’t quite get what this is. From what I’ve just read it’s transistors with zero heat dissipation caused by zero-ing out the RAM.
So okay, we have perfect RAM which never needs to be zero’d out, and 1 can be easily be reversed to a 0 if we know the operation that yielded it… but what is the actual computational benefit here?
For a computer to have reversible RAM, doesn’t that mean we would need to store more computation in order to roll back operations (and again, why would we want to?)
RISC-V and getting even more low power+max performance
Not sure if anyone here would say AI regardless of the title, but for me it would have to be nuclear fusion
Realistic Batteries. It’s holding back a LOT of things. A lot of technologies are solved, but just require power.
Semi-Realistic Room Temperature Super-Conductor.
If that can be solved, the power density and efficiencies would just be astronomical… It would absolutely destroy multi-billion industries overnight.
Way-Out-There-Stuff If they ever prove out an actual functional EmDrive-like thruster, that would absolutely open up space travel to our species.
Batteries are the big one. Can you imagine how many people (homeowners/renters) will go out and buy a tiny 100W panel knowing that even though it will fill a battery with energy very slowly, they can still bank on it for a week?
Right now we have batteries that can survive about a day, using a modern solar panel system with inverter (~1000€). Imagine when we have batteries that can store weeks of power.
solar
solar!
Not only on the large scale of things,
But even robots would be in wide spread use if it had a useable runtime.
Something like this, you’re good for 20min before it needs to charge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29ECwExc-_M
But if you could pull that off where it runs for 8 to 12 hours before needing to charge? They would be used everywhere.
Fusion. I think it’s our only hope of making it through climate change without massive losses.
I don’t think fusion has any chance of being widely deployed by the time that becomes an issue.
I agree with this. The extreme weather keeps getting significantly worse YOY, and a recent extreme temperature spike in the antarctic has scientists worried that our timeline is a lot shorter than previously estimated, which means significant action needs to be soon.
We are making excellent progress with fusion, especially the recent development to use AI to keep the magnetic fields containing the reaction stable, but how long will it be before we have a material that is strong enough to withstand the heat of a literal miniature sun for the years at a time required to run a plant? Just the energy from the magnetic field is strong enough that they’ve developed a super efficient was to use those microwaves to bore holes through the earth’s crust hundreds of times deeper than ever before. So we have to at least come up with something significantly stronger than the pressurized material 2km deep into the earth’s surface.
I am and will remain on the fusion bandwagon, but putting all of our eggs in that basket is a baaaad idea with the current state of things. On that note, that crust-boring technique i mentioned should make geothermal much more viable.
Honestly, I would consider it too late if it ready to build the first commercial plant right now. Building one of those takes a decade or two and building them all over the world takes significantly longer as expertise doesn’t pop up out of nowhere in as many people as you want and neither does funding happen for plants all over the world as the first one isn’t even finished yet.
There’s a massive fusion reactor in the sky that we could easily use by turning the radiation from it into electricity or harnessing the winds that are caused by the temperature differences it creates.
Nuclear fusion still has a long way to go, but to slow climate change (already too late to stop it) we need to act now.
Nuclear Fission, it’s amazing how far the technology has come.
do you mean fusion? fusions the one that separate atomic nuclei that we’ve had since the 1940’s. fusions the one where atomic nuclei are combined, that make headlines when the reactors run for more than a few seconds
Your correction is a bit confusing as you said “fusion” three times and “fission” zero times.
I mean Fission - Fusion is also exciting but still a ways off… Fission is usable today.
Regrowing / regenerating certain body parts.
This could theoretically be done with stemcell stuff, but it’s not there yet. However, when we finally reach the point where we can infinitely regenerate our body cells, we’ll become effectively “ammortal”; unable to die due to natural causes (such as illness), but we will still die from other people (for example, a bullet to the head)
Besides that, I think nuclear fusion would be an incredible development if we can finally harness it to power our homes.
Fusion won’t be the silver bullet people tout it as for much of the same reasons as fission isn’t (mostly politics). No politician wants to spend billions of dollars on something that is going to take a decade to even be functional and another decade to break even. It would get cheaper with scale, but so would fission, we just never let it get there. It also still produces radioactive waste, despite what proponents claim, and it even produces more radioactive waste than a fission reactor by volume. But it isn’t as long-lived.
These are the same tired arguments we hear about fission. If your country isn’t actively building fission, it’s probably not going to build fusion, aside from demonstrations.
Reusable rocketry, specifically SpaceX Starship. If it pans out it’s going to completely change our access to space and make many of those old dreams from the 1970s plausible.
RNA vaccines for basically everything, including customized vaccines for cancer. There’s also actual progress happening in general cures for autoimmune diseases.
Is robotics too close to AI? There are multiple companies working on general-purpose humanoid robots intended for mass production with price targets in the ten to twenty thousand dollar range, we may be getting within sight of actual robot butlers.
I’m really not looking forward to the commercialization of low earth orbit, and SpaceX seems to be an accelerator of this.
Low Earth orbit has been heavily commercialized for decades already. If you mean Starlink specifically, what’s wrong with it?
Looking up at the night sky and seeing a visible stream of dots
Ah, that only happens right after launch when they’re still bunched together. Once the satellites get into their final orbit they spread out. The newer models also have anti-reflection systems that make them much harder to spot, SpaceX has been working with astronomers on that.
I just hope we use Starships capabilities to put less single use hardware in Orbit. The way it is build already releases less space junk for delivering payloads, but these payloads need to be build with servicing in mind. Even building them to burn up should not be the solution
Yeah the Starship is a great idea, then Starlink et al is just fast food for space basically.
Computing at the edge.
Reduces the need to send everything to the cloud and maintains privacy.
How does it maintain privacy?
Instead of sending the data to the cloud for calculation/analytics, it does it right there on the device.
For example, an Alexa or Google Home device sends everything you say after a wake-word back to Amazon or Google. A device with sufficient edge storage and compute would be able to do the same without sending your voice outside your home.
We’re not quite there yet, but it’s getting closer.
I’m pretty sure that’s not what edge computing is. You’ve just described client-side computing.
The “edge” is similar to a CDN. Usually some kind of application layer code that’s running in an ISP data center rather than in a cloud provider’s data center.
I explained in a different comment… Talking about edge devices not the cloud: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/edge-computing/edge-devices.html
Isn’t edge computing just a distributed cloud? With servers physically closer to end-user?
That’s a cloud-centric interpretation. Like using CDNs. That’e been around for a while.
What I think will be interesting is intelligent processing and storage on end-node devices, like a home gateway, smart appliances, or wearable devices.
That would be cool
Internal alpha-therapy. Imagine attaching a radioactive atom to an antibody that would fix to a cancer, then as alpha radiation do a lot of damage, at a very short range destroy the cancer without doing much damage to the rest of the body
See that documentary for example
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DkhSFS0FY4https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EVTOL
3D printed homes
I used to be pretty excited about 3d printed homes, but an argument I’ve seen, that’s made me a lot more skeptical of them, is that much of the work of building isn’t putting up the actual walls, it’s all the wiring, plumbing, installing windows and climate control and insulation and roofing and whatever else like that that turns a building from essentially an artificial cave into a more livable space. A 3d printer that prints you walls out of concrete or whatever is only doing the easy part for you in that case, and not necessarily even in the most efficient or desirable manner. Not to say that the idea of more efficient ways to build housing cheaply isn’t interesting to me, I just think that it’d be something more boring, like a a bunch of improvement to modular prefab construction. 3d printing is an awesome technology, but it’s not a good option for everything
I agree, I used to work for a company that made mobile homes in a an assembly line fashion. Two of us could cut and assemble all of the interior and exterior walls in under two days for an 80 foot home. It’s all the other stuff that took time and a lot more people to piece together.
Aren’t there lego-like blocks one can use that allow for simultaneous cavity space and holes for wiring/plumbing and other infrastructure?
In my naive mind, it’s just a matter of being able to make a reliable brick set that one can snap together and then fill.
The democratization of embedded programming and the capacities it offers. Coupled with 3D printing you can build your own robots or machines with minimal knowledge and money.
