It’s a device that resembles a doorframe. Where the door would be is a flat wall of mostly transparent cleverness that cleanses all matter that passes through it of that which is not supposed to be there.
So you walk through it and your entire body becomes perfectly clean, free of viruses and bacteria. It even removes the waste contents of your bowels and bladder.
If you walked through it carrying something it would clean that too. So if you took a spanner or a tennis ball with you you’d find that you’d have what appears to be a brand new tennis ball (albeit not as firm. The device can’t add stuff, just remove it) or spanner.
I think I first thought of this in my early double-digit childhood. And then again just now (after thinking I need to wash my hands because they are oily)
What cool interesting devices have you thought of in your lifetime? Feasibility is not a requirement here.
How do you make sure that it doesn’t remove something that you want, but it thinks is dirt? Or what if it doesn’t remove something that it ought to, but thinks it belongs?
“Dry me! I’m wet!”
And he emerged on the other side a dessicated corpse, with nt a drop of water in his body.
[too late for] edit: When I originally devised it: It did not require any interaction. It would simply remove anything ‘unclean’. So water is ok. It would probably clean the water itself. So you’d emerge wet with pure water.
The lenses and frame would be make of a synthetic material that becomes transparent when exposed to body heat. After a few minutes, the glasses would disappear. Once you took them off, they would cool down and become visible again.
Yes, I’m aware of the problems here. But it’s a nice daydream.
Antigravity, of course, and since the galaxies are actually accelerating apart, it seems to exist in some form already.
My moneymaker is a DNA scanner/ reset pill. Sometime in youth you give a blood sample and get a precise revording of you genetic code. Later, if you get cancer or some other genetic disease, you take a pill that re-writes the code of every single body cell to the original code. You just reset your DNA and eliminate any mutations since.
This idea has huge potential for turning perfectly good people into huge masses of insensible stem cells.
Of course, if the pill is sufficiently awesome that it can reconstruct all of the epigenetic information surrounding your normal DNA (all of the chemical on-off switches, etc. that tell your cells who they are and what they do) after it’s done wreaking clean-slate havoc, it’s a great idea. With that kind of tiny, amazing computing power at my disposal, though, I’d rather upload my mind into an amazing robot brain. (Seamlessly, though, replacing the organic matter bit by bit so that whatever is “me” can be as continuous as possible.)
I’ve never invented anything from my own imagination per se, I have thought about technology I’ve heard about over the years. Example: inertia fields/control of gravity. Imagine an aircraft where you could accelerate in rather short order, like from stationary to Mach 1 in one second without the pilot feeling any G force. The pilot could rest a coffee cup on his lap and perform any maneuver at whatever attitude or altitude he wanted, without even so much as making the liquid move in his cup. At all times he would feel a comfortable one G in his cockpit. The only limit being the structural strength of the aircraft providing you couldn’t influence that as well. Like the movie Explorers.
I’ve often contemplated advanced robobtics at landfills. Imagine if there was a cheap way to sort through society’s garbage. Everything could be sorted, recycled and resold in one fashion or another. Organic garbage would be turned into soil to be resold to companies like Scotts or Miracle Grow. Plastics would be recycled. Precious metals melted down. All this done by robotics. This would all be profitable of course. Humanity’s waste completely recycled by robots running on the methane they created.
A more recent future technology I’ve wondered about is the solar sail combined with that slow, but constantly acceleration ion drive I’ve heard about. Providing they both work, NASA could combine the technologies and send probes to nearby star systems. They could pass Pioneer and Voyager probes relatively quickly.
Tentacle bracelets. Bracelets that have extendable, AI controlled robotic tentacles. When turned off, they contract and wrap around the arm, for a ridged bracelet or sleeve look. They require a brain implant to use; the implant interprets your desires and the AI implements them. They have small camera “eyes”, so they can see what to do when you can’t, or feed images to your implant. You can reach around a corner and pick someone’s pocket, or over a wall taller than you and pull yourself up.
Cyborg body parts that look pretty, or like a fantasy creature’s appendage ( as opposed to the “Borg” look ). Wings that are actually coolant systems for an internal power plant, “jeweled headbands” that are a sensor system, sonar systems that look like horns, etc.
Power Staves, inspired by watching Star Wars, and playing with sparklers at night on July 4th. They are meant to be used by someone with Jedi-style precognitive powers; when spun they leave a trail in the air of energy; an afterimage-like short term force field that blocks incoming fire. They are open at both ends and hollow, and the hollow core can charge the air inside into a plasma, either to be fired as a plasma blast or used as a free electron laser. In combat, it would be spun about the body leaving a defensive force trail behind it, and fire upon the enemy whenever the ends pointed at a target.
Teleportation guns ( which I’ve since found in fiction, but thought of on my own ). A “gun” that’s a receiver for a teleportation system. The version I thought of was a circle on a handle; the circle is the teleport receiver and can gate in various munitions/objects fired from elsewhere according to the user’s desire. Such as projectiles fired by something like this, perhaps - a bit hard to keep in a holster. Or perhaps a shell fired from a dismounted 16 inch battleship gun.
That’s why you let someone else test the beta version.
I’m gonna invent a time machine and travel back in time to give myself the schematic so that I can invent it.
Cool.
What could go wrong?
I’m still waiting…
‘Invisibility’ camouflage. It’s been bouncing around my head for ten or 15 years, and it was prompted by an experiment that took place (IIRC) in WWII. Lights were placed on a truck (or tank) and when they were turned on (in the daytime, again IIRC) the vehicle became hard to see against the sky, as it could be in a desert theatre. They might have tried it with aircraft too.
So I got to thinking about a fabric incorporating zillions of micro camera/projector domes with a processor to capture an image from one side of the wearer and project it on the other side – basically making the wearer transparent. The processor would adjust the images for angles.
ISTR a similar garment (from Japan?) that was shown last year, but without all of the hardware my decade-plus-year-old idea.
I’d like to be able to grow some improved cuttlefish chromatophores* on my skin so that I could change color at will. With practice and some spiffy neural rewiring, maybe I could even learn to make myself display moving tattoos at will.
Imagine–you want to write a note to yourself, so you just trace it on the back of your hand (or think it onto the back of your hand, if you’re that good.) You feel like you want a full tattooed sleeve, so you doodle on your arm with a fingertip, maybe, or visualize the finished product really hard. You decide to sprout an animated Dali moustache or an ephemeral pop culture meme that’s hilarious at the time.
Then it’s time to go visit Grandma, so you turn it all off with a thought.
A human scanner. Similar to a scanner for documents but it scans people, saves them in a file which can then be attached to an email and sent to a recipient on the other side of the world.
The recipient then downloads the attached file to to their PC and prints it to a special human printer that will recreate the scanned person intact and alive. This will take the hassle out of long distance travel.
A laser insect screen, that recognises and kills any unwanted creepy crawly as soon as it reaches the threshold or windowsill, but is harmless to humans and household pets.
