We currently carry tricorders in our pockets. I can see a medical tricorder being ubiquitous for field medics, ships, and the like within 100 years.
Portable communicators. It would be slick to have a USB c tricorder though.
Hold up. I’m pretty sure things that already exist don’t count.
…you mean phones?
Download the Phyphox app to access your phones raw sensor data. Very much like a tricorder.
Cancer curing nanotechnology
borg nanoprobes, or replicator nanites of sg1 and sga.
Artificial stem cells seem like the next thing to really revolutionize medicine.
Quantum computers for brute force hacks seems doable in 100.
Eye tracking pointer devices will likely be more convenient than mice within a dozen or two years. This will probably be widely available for people who are paralyzed first.
Diamond processors are always 10 years away, but I think we can do it in 100. This would revolutionize the amount of power we can put through a chip without worrying about cooling.
Quick charge capacitor replacements for standard rechargble batteries
Low yield fusion plants. I’d like to think of them as capable of high yield, but it’s much harder than initially thought. Some ideas are quite promising for low yield.
The eye tracking stuff exists already. There are medical device companies that build and sell these things.
I feel like the bottleneck will be with smooth continuous motions. It’s very easy to move a cursor in that way with a mouse but you can’t do that motion with your eyes unless you are looking at something else that’s moving.
Fair. Check this out. The existing stuff is pretty cool https://youtu.be/CP3t8qMHcsM
Vaccines. Maybe in 100 years we’ll even be able to eliminate measles…again.
Railguns, there already exist prototypes that destroy themselves. So close!
I thought we already had rail guns on ships?
No. Well kinda.
The Ford class uses what is basically a rail gun to launch planes but big navy decided against continuing development on railguns as a weapon.
Asteroid mining. We’ve had the tech to get people to the asterodi for decades, just lack the will to do it.
Okay I’ve had this astroid mining concept dining around my empty skull for a while now. The way I see it is that going up to space and mining an astroid for minerals and then bringing them back down to earth will never be a worthwhile endeavour. If you’re mining them in space and using the material manufacturing in space then that seems more plausible. The only way I can think of planetary based astroid mining being worthwhile is if instead of mining the rock and sending it down in crafts, you just bump the astroid so it’s on a collision course with earth and then mine whatever is left from impact. In anycase, I’d say we are far off being able to mine asteroids since imo, the only worthwhile way to do it is by having the entire process in space. And we’re not even close to that level of infrastructure existing in space.
Tricorders, cellphones are already partway there they just need more durable, small sensors like a handheld light spectrometer to tell what things are made of and a handheld interferometer to detect gravity
I can detect gravity without a device:
Jump off a roof. If you hit the ground, you’ve detected gravity.
You could just raise your arm and let it loose…
Check out the app Phyphox, it uses all your existing sensors and probably surpasses tricorders in several ways while, of course, lacking in a few others.
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Ai and eeg can read brain waves generate images already kinda decent, maybe meet the robinsons memory viewer machine.
Can we get a dream recorder, please?!
external gestation…a womb with a view
severe genetic manipulation… designer babies
digit/limb/organ regeneration
Seems entirely reasonable that a Gattaca future is achievable. Whether desirable is the other question. Somewhere CJ Cherryh is being worshipped as a prophet.
Artificial wombs are something that’s often presented as dystopian, but I would imagine would actually be a very good thing. Beyond the obvious help it would be to infertile couples that desired children, they would if commonly adopted eliminate the danger of birth and pregnancy complications, and discomfort associated with the process. Probably not everyone would want to use it, but I’d bet even having the option would mean a lot to a lot of people.
The real downside to artificial wombs is that we may rapidly become dependent on them. Half of pregnancies result in spontaneous abortion. With external gestation that assumedly wouldn’t happen. That’s a hell of a lot of evolutionary pressure which could have all kinds of consequences.
And then all of this gave birth to the terrorists known as the Naturalists™…
They just released a story about removing the gene that causes down syndrome. Pretty huge
FTL communication using quantum entangled particles.
Not possible; entanglement collapse can’t be used to send information
The idea is this:
2 particles are quantum entangled. Whatever happens to one instantly happens to the other regardless of distance.
So you establish a state that means “0” and a state that means “1” and you can send binary.
At a minimum, you have quantum Morse code.
If you change one of the particles it just breaks the entanglement. If you measure one, then you instantly know the state the other will have when measured, but the result of your measurement - and therefore the other one also - is random. The only way to correlate the two measurements of the two particles is to send the results (at C or slower) to the same place and compare them. Otherwise each just looks like a random result.
(I know nothing about this)
Could you to the sub-C measurement test enough times to show that it just empirically works, and then use it on that basis? Or are you saying that the sub-C measurement would prove that it doesn’t work (and it produces random noise)?
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘use it on that basis’. Yes, entanglement has been proven to work, but it can’t be used to communicate FTL.
Read the link posted. They already did it. In 2007. At a distance of 144km.
I read it. Doesn’t mention FTL, because that’s not a possibility for actually transmitting info.
Edit: I think the way these quantum encryption systems work is that basically the photons (and I assume it’s polarization being measured) become the encryption key to a message that is sent conventionally.
Like the sender generates a bunch of entangled photons, sends the paired ones to the recipient, measures their photons and uses the results to encrypt the message, the receiver measures theirs and gets the same results, the sender sends the encrypted message over email or whatever, and the recipient has the same key because of entanglement.
Meanwhile an eavesdropper measuring the photons would mess them up for the recipient so the message wouldn’t decrypt.
I’m familiar with quantum entanglement. It doesn’t work because you have no way of affecting which state you’ll measure, and thus what state the other particle will be in.
Read the link posted. They already did it. In 2007. At a distance of 144km.
No they didn’t, they sent a conventional signal that was encrypted with an entangled particle. Nothing was sent ftl, this is like if I had two boxes that I know have the same thing in them, an encryption key, and traveled across the world, and sent you a message, you have the other box, the information in that box didn’t go ftl you just opened it later.
there is no path to ftl communication here.
have a basic video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oBiS_Yb9Ac
The FTL is the sci-fi component that is the subject of the thread, the quantum entanglement communication part is the real world piece they actually got working.
It will never be possible to use this for ftl communications. This is like saying in 100 years we will use very long steel rods to communicate ftl by pushing on them. The problem is fundamental.
That wasn’t FTL
That’s not the part you were trying to say couldn’t be done. ;) You were trying to argue that quantum entanglement couldn’t be used to communicate, clearly it can.
The FTL bit is the science fiction premise of the thread. ;)
That is indeed that bit I was saying couldn’t be done. Entanglement alone can’t be used to communicate; a signal has to be sent conventionally over the distance.
The FTL bit is physically impossible, so it’s not really “achievable in a reasonable time-frame”
Not FTL though. Slower than light, causality preserving version? Sure.
Huh?
Exceeding FTL (and breaking causality) is basically a sci fi trope at this point with about as much credibility as psychics. To have at least some credibility you need one of: a testable hypothesis, or an unexplained phenomenon. Right now we have neither. At best, we have some equations, that work below light speed, where we can extrapolate past light speed and see how the math works. The problem is: none of these equations are testable as they all contain infinities or other asymptotic features that prevent passing light speed itself. So, if there’s no viable math to get from sublight to FTL, and there’s no unexplained phenomena, then what we’re left with is nothing.
Even quantum entanglement, which is a darling of sci fi whenever they need a plot device (hello Le Guin and the ansible), has categorically been shown to obey causality and the light speed limit in every lab test.
At some point it’s like asking for negative mass, antigravity, or other things that the math would allow. Except our universe doesn’t.
I’ve got a wormhole to sell you ;)
Obviously if we were to exceed light speed we would turn into lizards and mate with each other and have lizard babies. I thought this was common knowledge.
in scifi there seems to be several types of ftl: one is typical warp like drive of trek, and star wars, and hyperdrives which is similar to transwarp/slipstream/xindi vortex travel, which is interdimensional travel so not technically violating light speed. and the least common one is interdimensional teleportation, BSG reimanging uses this tech, although they dint bother trying to explain it with technobabble at all, because of the showrunners allergy to trek-speak. STD, and a single episode arc of tng a group of terrorists were using interdimensional transporters.
trek also had other forms of ftl, but those are very rare, and its pretty much similar to the last 2.
Basically, physics says that nothing, not even information can actually travel faster than the speed of light. It’s a universal limit that shows up when you do the math on relativity. This concept is called “causality”.
Because of this, FTL communication is probably impossible. Quantum entanglement seems like it could provide a loophole, but it doesn’t actually work that way. To actually use quantum entanglement for communication, it actually needs a confirmation message, which would have to be delivered by a different means (every quantum message needs a non-quantum confirmation). That confirmation would be bound by the speed of light, thus preserving causality.
This is a very very rough description based on my memory, so some details may be a little off, but it should cover the gist. This article goes into more detail:
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/quantum-entanglement-faster-than-light/
Edit: After reading, the answer is more that attempting to impart information onto the entangled particles to send a message necessarily breaks the entanglement and thus does not transmit the information to the other side. Entangling the particles makes their states related to each other, but only at the time of entanglement, and anything that changes either particle (including measuring it) will break the entanglement going forward.
Yup. You just summed up the start of the conversation I had with ChatGPT to figure out exactly what we were talking about Here and why the fact that even if we can’t directly send coherent information, if it appears that a change in particle A directly causes a change in particle B, and it appears that that causation happened Instantaneously, we can’t ever prove it or measure it or know it for certain, because the proving measuring and knowing would have to have occurred at instantaneously themselves in order to actually be proof at all. The even more fascinating part I wound up with is discovering the Holographic Principle, as discovered by Beckenstein and later expanded on and proven by Stephen Hawking, that says that all information in the 3-D world is actually encoded into a 2-D framework. That one blew my mind and I’m gonna be thinking about that for a while.
The holographic principle is fascinating, though a quick nitpick: I’m pretty sure we’ve only proven it for contracting spacetimes (as opposed to our expanding one), but a lot of people imagine it does apply to ours as well (I certainly suspect it does)
I followed this branch of the rabbit hole. Goddamn you for bringing another contradiction into play in my brain!
I would guess that we’ll most-likely have AGI in 100 years. That’s pretty futuristic and impactful.
fusion maybe, but in scifi, it often requires an alien race making first contact, we wont even get to things like anti-matter tech without that intervention. SG1 is more in our time frame, but with aliens already possessing advanced tech
I’d really like to at least see humanity fully switch to clean energy in my lifetime but I’m losing hope.
I should already be able to take a self-driving flying taxi to work. I should already be able to vacation on the moon. We shouldn’t be burning stuff to power all our modern tech.
I grew up on 80s/90s scifi. I hope humanity can get it’s shit together and that the current anti-intellectualism phase we’re in is just part of a larger cycle.
Flying taxis won’t happen, way too many risks, even in the future, never mind the horrors of having your skies full of that crap.
We have auto-pilots for planes, those are mostly fine. People are the problem. I dont trust humans to operate motor vehicles in 2 dimensions, let alone 3…
I don’t think auto pilot works how you seem to think it does…
Obviously I know how they work, I saw it in a documentary about Airplanes. The Otto pilot inflates at the press of a button (or is inflated manually) and they fly the plane.
To be fair, you have a 1 in 95 chance of dying in an automobile accident.
Based on modern safety standards for everything else, that’s unacceptable.
If I offered you a job and said you have a 1 in 95 chance of dying from working this job, you would refuse. The most dangerous job in the USA is logging, with about a 1 in 1000 chance of dying. More lumberjacks die driving home than die working their extremely dangerous job.
Not only should we have self-driving flying taxis by now, but we should also at least have level 5 self-driving cars so people aren’t constantly dying driving to get groceries or pick up their kids.
No
What we need is more bicycle roads, pedestrian walk ways and public transportation
Suffice to say that 1 bus is safer than 30 cars but it also generates a shit tonne less pollution, but also keep in mind that the vast majority of car rides are short distance, even in the US
In the Netherlands they changed everything to prefer bicycles and walking and it’s noticable. It changed architecture. It’s why in the Netherlands there are broad loads of small super markets. Wherever you are within a town you’ll have a super market at walking distance
Many people there don’t have a car, not because they can’t afford it but because they don’t want one. Cars are expensive, cumbersome, dangerous, and ugly. You won’t see depressing towns there that are 70% concrete roads or parking lots. It’s all beautiful because they got rid of all that, it isn’t needed.
In before anyone starts about how this can’t be done in the US: it can, and quite easily. Pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure costs a fraction of car infrastructure, it’s easier and faster to build, no parking lots required, you can now make that a store and get taxes from it, it’ll make your cities richer. People get more exercise, they’ll be healthier and happier, there are no downsides. Inclines near mountainous areas? Electrical bikes to the rescue.
Please please do NOT push this car stuff, especially flying car stuff. It’s not needed, it’s a waste, it’s polluting even when electric, and we have flying cars, they’re called planes and there is a reason why pilots need to learn and train a LOT more than car drivers.
