What technologies and/or scientific concepts are currently in the hopper so to speak and are likely to affect day to day life within the next 10 years
Like is someone really close to having a workable personal jet pack?
Are nanites going to be assisting with my triple bypass sugery in 2011?
Are flying cars going to be a rich man’s toy by the time Barak Obama runs for VP?
Will those cute little Japanese robots that can pop&lock be the cool new ‘pet’.
I know there are very knowledgeable people on here who would love to spout some information. (I’m sure someone will link to a thread from 1999 that already discussed this and expect it to be helpful)
They’ve had workable jet packs since the 70’s. You’re not going to see a Jetson’s style jet pack any time soon.
Nope.
I don’t know who Barak Obama is, but I doubt that we’ll see Jeton’s style flying cars any time soon.
The technololgy to make flying cars has been around for quite some time. The problem with a flying car is not only do you require energy to make it go forward, but it also requires energy to stay up. The fuel requirements make a flying car very expensive and very short range.
You can buy hovercar kits now, you just can’t fly them on the highway, nor are you likely to be able to do so any time in the forseeable future.
4)Yes. But you’ll loose interest in it 30 days after the purchase. (I think the Sony Qrio will be ready in a few years according to the website.)
Seriously, about #'s 1 & 3. Judging by how people drive, every powerline in america would be ripped down. Secondly, the thought of being reduced to a smoking hole in the ground due to a minor malfunction equivalent to a blown tire makes me uneasy.
You’d have to revamp the entire power, telephone, and communications infrastructure. You have no idea how hard it is to see a radio tower guywire from the air.
But technology could overcome all of this, I guess. But don’t hold yer breath.
…wow so I guess it was a mistake providing examples.
Let’s just pretend I said: What technologies and/or scientific concepts are currently in the hopper so to speak and are likely to affect day to day life within the next 10 years
Of course, a problem with the OP is that anyone who has a genuinely good idea about this stuff is possibly trying very quietly to corner a select number of strategic markets…
Not me, that is.
So, FWIW: I don’t think we’ve yet seen much of the good stuff that will come out of biotechnology. There’s a big difference between documententing all the human gene sequences and figuring how to make a buck off of them, but some very smart people are working on it. Big advances are coming… uh, any day now. Maybe. But trust me on this.
Any day now, we’ll see more advances in nanotechnology, building machines and computers the size of large molecules. Lightweight, they are. Cheap. Maybe.
Any day now, the physicists could announce a breakthrough in “fusion” - a relatively clean form of nuclear energy - or who knows, even “cold fusion” - safer, and possibly small enough to fit in your automobile. It is, ah, going to take a while to work the bugs out, though… even when (if, really) they figure how to do it in the first place.
Room temperature “super conductors” - energy a lot more efficient than we have now, maybe leading to more feasible “maglev” trains, trains that float over the tracks.
And more, much more. Keep reading Scientific American - or just look at the pictures, like I do.
IMHO, but if you thought the world was weird now, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.
Go to the library and read the current issues of “Popular Science” amd “Popular Mechanics” magazines for all the latest pie in the sky predictions.
All too often the touted solutions to the worlds multitude of problems seldom if ever make it to market.
I don’t know if I can come up with things that are likely to affect day-to-day life, but I can throw out some interesting things that might make a splash…
Internet-enabled everything (internet refridgerators, etc.). Some of them are apparently already available, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they become common. I also expect we’ll all have something along the lines of MapQuest in our cars, and probably other internet applications I haven’t thought of.
Thermal depolymerization (making oil out of organic waste, from turkey guts to old tires). Even if it works, it isn’t going to make a HUGE dent in our energy needs, but it’s interesting none-the-less.
That’s all I have to add at the moment. Probably lots of biotech neatness, too, I guess (DNA computers? I doubt they’ll be noticed soon outside of research. Nanotechnology? We may start seeing some used for… something)…
This may not qualify as affecting day-to-day life, but pharmacogenetics is one are that’s set to explode in the next few years. In layman’s terms, that’s the study of how your genetic makeup influences your reaction to medication. In the future, instead of, for instance, trying a bunch of different antidepressants at different dosages to find one that works for you, a simple blood test will help your doctor predict which drug will be most effective at which dose.
The lab I work in is already offering a few genetic tests along these lines, and there are many more coming. In fact, the FDA is planning on making this testing a requirement before doctors prescribe some types of drugs in the next few years.
There are very few things which are going to go from nonexistant now to widely-available within ten years. What you’ll see, for the most part, will either be things which are nonexistant now become available to a limited degree (either in experimental prototypes, or toys for rich show-offs), or things which already exist to a limited degree becoming more widespread (Jon’s example of navigation systems in cars might be a good example of this).
There will likely be some things which go from nonexistant to ubitquitous within ten years: When the polymerase chain reaction process was developed a decade or so ago, for example, it took less than a year before it started showing up in high school biology labs. Now, it’s a critical tool for any sort of genetics work. But all of the things which show up that quickly are breakthroughs, rather than developments of and refinements to previous work, which makes them essentially impossible to predict.
I’m going to have to - gulp - disagree with you here. We’ve recently seen camera phones go from at least unheard of - if not nonexistant - to incredibly widespread with about a year. I don’t see any reason to quash expectations of other gadget/convenience-type things (which seem to be mostly what the OP is asking about) showing up within the next 10 years.
But that’s just the juxtaposition of digitial cameras and cell phones. It isn’t a fundamental breakthrough like the polymerase chain reaction process.
Something to watch is quantum cryptography. It’s already practical on a small scale (and I think there is a company that offers it) but when it takes off it will completely change the security landscape even more fundamentally than public-key cryptography did in the 1970s.
No offense, but I completely disagree. Quantum cryptography is not really a code; it’s a way to build a secure physical channel. You can only communicate along that particular fiber-optic cable with polarizing detectors at either end. It’s an advance, sure, having a guaranteed non-eavesdroppable phone line, but it’s useless for the vast bulk of crypto applications, such as encoding internet traffic.
Well, to be fair, using the OP’s examples as a context (granted, he told us to ignore the examples later on) most of what he’s talking about would include combining known tech into new things, since we can’t really predict breakthroughs very well.
For example, the flying car is just an Airplane and a Car (I’m assuming that to be considered a flying car, a plane would have to be able to effectly function as a ground vehicle, thus disqualifying planes from being flying cars to begin with)
The robot pets are just a further development of robotics and toy manufacturing
The jetpack is a combination of jet propulsion and backpacks. (Yeah, I know, reaching)
One thing I’m kinda expecting is mobile video phones. Combine camera phones with videoconferencing. Sure, you’d look like a goofball holding your phone in front of you while you talk, but not any more than you would taking pictures with it. Added bonus? Less concern of tumors, since you’d have to hold the phone at arm’s length from your head for the person to see anything other than your earwax.
I think the one thing that you’ll see in the relatively immediate future, which will be somewhat revolutionary, is the unification of media. You may choose to not classify this as a scientific concept, but it’s something that many visionaries predict happening that will effect just about all of us.
Soon, all phone, cable TV, and internet will become one in the same. Expect land-based phone companies to go the way of the dinosaur, being supplanted by cell phones and internet communications. there will cease to be a distinction between the internet and cable TV. The “cable box” everyone now has will end up being more of a internet portal which decodes the signal for display on traditional TVs.
When you change channels you’ll be more or less just flicking to a different “site” with a different video “stream”. There is nothing fundamentally different about this from what’s possible today, but expect the data compression algorithms, processing power, and bandwidth improvements to all converge to the point where almost nothing occurs in analog any more.
In the end, I think the only difference between a TV and a computer will be the type of software on it and the type of user interface (keyboard/mouse vs. remote control).
As for something more revolutionary, I wouldn’t be surprised (maybe this is cock-eyed optimism) to see a “cure” for viruses. Perhaps we’ll finally get away from the concept of vaccines and viral treatments for something that actually kills the virus while it’s in us like penicillin did to bacteria. This happening would be the invention of the century, since the cure for cancer is probbaly more than 100 years away. I have no insight into the likelyhood of this happening, but it seems like the logical next step.
OK, how about this. Ubiquitous surveilance will become possible. Every cop will carry a small video camera clipped to his hat to document his every move, every jail cell will have a video camera on it to document that the prisoners are behaving, every street corner will have a video camera, everyone walking down the street will have a video camera to document the actions of the cops. And given computing advances, you’ll be able to point your video camera at someone, ask “who’s that”, and get every publicly available scrap of information about that person. The mitigating factor is that if you point your video camera at someone and uber-Google their information, they’ll probably have some agent that will detect that someone’s uber-Googling their information and alert them. “Attention. That guy 10 feet behind you is a stalker. Automatic call to 911 has been made”.
Oh, and you could have UAV’s parked everywhere. From that 911 call, a cop back at headquarters activates the nearest UAV and trails the perp. If the perp gets frisky, the UAV has a handy taser to incapacitate him. Of course, every scrap of video evidence will be available at trial, both the actions of the perp, the actions of the victim, and the actions of the cop. It’ll be a lot harder to get away with some forms of crime.
This illustrates the difficulties in this question. Ubitquitous surveilance is already possible, and has been for some time now. We could have this any time we wanted it. But we don’t want it. Predicting when and if we ever will want it is not a question of the science or the technology, but of sociology, which is much harder to predict (and certainly harder to predict for a hard scientist).
Expect another sexual revolution if this happens.
Parent: Why are you running around having sex, do you not respect yourself?!!
Teenager: Of course I respect myself.
Parent: But you could get pregnant!
Teenager: No I couldn’t, I’m on the pill.
Parent: Well, you could get an STD!
Teenager: No I couldn’t.
Parent: I guess you’ve got a point. Run along now, and have fun.
Big advances in the next few years… Expect OLEDs to revolutionize displays. Everything from tvs, computers, cell phones, etc. They just came out with 40" display a week or two ago.
From wikipedia entry:
The radically different manufacturing process of OLEDs lends itself to many advantages over traditional flat panel displays. Since OLEDs can be printed onto a substrate using traditional ink-jet technology they can have a significantly lower cost than LCDs or plasma displays. A more scalable manufacturing process enables the possibility of much larger displays. Unlike LCDs which employ a back-light and are incapable of showing true black, an off OLED element produces no light allowing for infinite contrast ratios. The range of colors, brightness, and viewing angle possible with OLEDs is greater than that of LCDs or plasma displays.
Without the need of a backlight, OLEDs use less than half the power of LCD displays and are well-suited to mobile applications such as cell phones and digital cameras.
The fact that OLEDs can be printed onto flexible substrates opens the door to new applications such as roll-up displays or displays embedded in clothing.