What technology from science fiction would you most like to see as science fact?
June 17, 2012
Stargate portal (credit: MGM)
Friday, @DARPA asked the twitterverse, “What technology from science fiction would you most like to see as science fact?”
Amusing answers, ranging from Stargate to “very tiny Rick Moranis” and Andy Levy’s “Black goo that tears apart your DNA.”
Your ideas?
Comments (78)
by Darkwind4
I would love thousands of Stargate Atlantis city- ships. They would be so cool!!!
by Darkwind4
STARGATE!!!
by hd
tee orgasmatron forever, Of course!
by Jason Reese
The Matrix instant skill and knowledge download technology.
by yota
Stop aging, with electromagnetic frequencies that will reprogram-fix the body to the desired age. Why some trees live for thousand years? I think we could too.
by marc2
a cure for stupidity would be high on my list
by Jeff Simmons
The replicator from Star Trek. The concept of tearing apart molecules from raw materials and building food or products upwards from the molecular level according to a designed output would be fantastic.
by Bri
Come on guy’s, this is DARPA. They were hoping you’d be asking for Captain America . That they are much closer to than worm holes. Carbon fibre infused skeletons, external body armor, etc they are very close to these. By the way, Gordon Russel’ thoughts are more provocative than most. Anyone who doesn’t like them can respond in any way. If I disagree, I can write about it, if not, I just scroll down.
by RobinSongs
Itchy & Scratchy Land.
by Chrispium
Bar none. Immortality. With immortality we’ll have time enough to make all the other stuff.
by melajara
Exactly! But let’s start with “emmortality” first to avoid any Hubris accusation.
by DCWhatthe
Virtual Reality, a holodeck. That will help to remove the bugs up our butts & eliminate a mountain of self-destructive behavior. That, in turn, will help us to think more clearly, releasing untapped genius. From there, we can choose the routes we want to pursue next.
by JohnnyG
A colony on either the Moon or Mars. These are not even too high-tech.
by John Doe
To Gordon Russel:
Actually I am hoping for something more near term. Nanobots and complete map of brain network are far future prospects. But, for example, smart gene therapy with the aim to change the excitability of n. accumbens msn-s might be accomplished in a decade or two. This way, basal “hedonic tone” could be increased beyond what is imaginable today, without turning us into opiated zombies, because gradients of well being and motivation would still exist – only on much higher level.
When it becomes possible to engineer pleasure circuits, I hope that most agonizing and formerly treatment-resistant types of depression will be banished forever and replaced with emotional paradise, with life filled with meaning, fascination, interests, curiosity, and also empathy, love and connectedness.
by Marcos Marin
Yes, the perfectly happy zombie slave who won’t question the state of the State (wow, it rhymed).. the one-seasoned ultimate couch potato, the Last Man… before the First Transhuman Übermensch. if we get there.
by Mr.X
You must be a poet!
by Alex_Ivanov
Cheap pills for life extension and rejuvenation in 10 years, cheap electricity everywhere in 20 years, first human brain simulation in 30 years, first intelligent robot in 40 years, first nanobot in 50 years, singularity in 100 years, instant teleportation to any place in universe in 1000 years, creation of a new universe in 1 000 000 years, finding the meaning of life in 1 000 000 000 years.
by Marcos Marin
I’ve already found the meaning of life, it took a fraction of the time all “great minds” of history took not to find it. It is not 42 but you still won’t like it (title of the book I will publish in a billion years, for your sole edification). I’m currently finishing the design of your 4th goal there, you’re waaay too pessimistic… though understandably, given the “experts” you are subjected to. =)
by Keith
1. Superintelligent self-improving friendly AI.
2. Molecular Nanotechnology.
3. Mind Uploading.
by Danny McNeal
It’s very hard to choose one discrete technology; but in the spirit of the concept which Kurzweil espouses of a post-singularity existential transformation of humanity, my fondest science-fiction-to-science-fact dream comes from the scifi novel “Eternity” by Greg Bear (Warner Books, NYC. 1990):
[Death, But Not Death]
__Mirsky shook his head sadly. “Come with me, Garry. There’s adventure. And some startling truths. You must decide soon. Very soon.”…
__Lanier closed his eyes to avoid the tunnel, but he could not. He hardly knew who he was now. “All right,” he said in a voice so weak it was not even a whisper.
__Something warm pressed behind his eyes, and he felt a sharpness — not painful, just sharp — throughout his head. The sharpness pared his thoughts away layer by layer, and for a brief moment, there was no self at all. Still the paring went on, unwinding, unraveling. Then the process seemed to reverse, and he felt things fall back into place, but with a
different texture underlying—as if he were a layer of paint on a canvas, being peeled from the old surface and pressed onto a new. Yet there was no surface, no ground, nothing solid to hang himself on, only the pattern and some ineffable connection to Mirsky, who no longer looked like Mirsky, or any human. What he saw now was not light, and what he heard from Mirsky was not words…
__Lanier could not feel his body, or for that matter anything else, but he could see in a fashion; seeing without eyes, wrapping himself around light and finding images…
[The Final Mind]
__”Who’s doing this?”
__”The Final Mind.”
__”Our descendants save us?”
__”With reason. The observations of living things are a distillation of the universe, a conversion of information to knowledge. All sensation, all thought, all experience, is gathered, not just at death, but throughout one’s life. That knowledge is precious; it can be distilled even further and passed through the tiniest fissures of connection between this universe, as it dies, and the new universe that is born out of it. The distillation imposes itself on the new creation, like the passage of seed, guides it away from chaos, impressing a pattern. The new creation can then develop its own intelligences, who will in some way or another repeat the process when their universe grows old.”
__”Nothing dies?”
__”Everything dies. But that which is special in all of us is saved… if the Final Mind succeeds. You see the urgency of my mission?”…
__Was this immortality, to be rendered into such a form that the Final Mind could remember all that you were?
__And not Earth alone, but all the worlds of this galaxy, and all the worlds of those galaxies filled with life, immense fields of hundreds of billions of worlds, some strange beyond imagining. Immense was not the word for such an undertaking. On any such scale, the fate of the Earth was less than insignificant, yet the Final Mind was diverse enough, powerful enough to reach down to Earth and shape history with such delicacy, focusing the eviternal on the infinitesimal…
__”What are we—spirit, energy?”
__”We are like a current using the hidden conduits by which particles of matter and energy speak to each other, tell each other where they are and what they are—pathways hidden to humans in our time, but available to the Final Mind.”
[FREEDOM]
__Now they moved through their hidden conduits to points between worlds… Complete freedom, a journey beyond all journeys… and, as Mirsky pointed out, a journey with a definite purpose.
__”The Final Mind needs many observers along the way, many progress reports. We can provide one continuous report, from the beginning, to the end.”
__”We won’t start here?” Lanier asked.
__”No. We go back to the beginning. We are only observers, after all, and not actors, now that our labor is done. The information we gather can have no effect on the times we’ll gather it from… First,” Mirsky told his companion, “we start at the beginning.”
__”And then?” Lanier asked.
__”We search for points of interest, until we come to the end.”
__”And then?”
What technology from scifi would I most like to see as science fact?—this. A post-technological existential conversion that allows complete and total freedom to explore, by running our consciousnesses on the hardware of the universe itself.
by Mike
A doorway to an alternate Earth a la Terry Pratchett’s Long Earth
A private beach at malibu or honolulu would be high on my list
by Carl Brooks
The number one has to be the matter replicator, jus because it would cure all the worlds ills.
Its quite interesting that allot of people look to star trek for the most inspiring technologies, however, i think the concept of what it means to be human in star trek would be the best thing to be made science fact, “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of Humanity.” – Picard, First Contact.
by Dennis R.
Near term, I’d like the Overlords from Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s end” to appear and become the benevolent rulers who prevent us from destroying ourselves while the next (organic?) evolutionary leap takes place.
Why reproduce (or make immortal) humanity in its current form? Much as I’d like to live “forever,” I’m very much a child of my birth year. Newer wetware won’t have the same expectations as me. Let them create their own future– one that’s different from “ours.”
by Clinton Chard
I am not so anxious for relinquishment as you are. I do not wish for any “Overlords” benevolent or otherwise. My fate, my destiny.
The invention of the neurointerface that will seamlessly integrate our minds with our computers will be the watershed moment for me. To enter into a virtual reality that is as seemingly real as our own will be very powerful. Training, sports, storytelling, entertainment, and much more will be changed. Travel will be reduced considerably as individuals will no longer need to physically be somewhere, everyone’s augmented reality could collaborate and the world will become a LAN party or MMO.
Lets remember also that no technology will be left unchanged and that all technologies will advance, a common failing of most sci-fi writers and thinkers. They tend to change one aspect of the future and leave most others untouched so they can concentrate on the message they want to impart. But the future cannot progress in that manner. Most technologies will change at an exponential rate, Ray’s “Law of Accelerating Returns”.
by GatorALLin
decoding dna to unlock tricks to live forever with high quality of life…
by GatorALLin
cold fusion….free unlimited energy for the world…..
by Marcos Marin
less useless polls from Darpa?
by Cornhusk
Go eat a ham
by DrDubious
A cure for the common cold.
by asiwel
anti-gravity and fusion power, for starters
by Gorden Russell
To asiwel,
go to the web site for the National Ignition Facility:
https://lasers.llnl.gov/
Then read the Wikipedia entry on it. The people there expect to do something great by October.
by graham c
time machine for me .
by Jukka
Star Trek’s replicator. It can also be used for recycling and holodeck.
by Gorden Russell
To Jukka,
By 2046 you will have your replicator and more.
By then we will have photovoltaic carbon nanocells that will take carbon from the air and spin those atoms into carbon nanotubes, graphene, buckminsterfullerene and more common carbon compounds such as sucrose and cellulose. These nanocells will weave carbon atoms into all the things that life already makes, not only silk, wool, linen and cotton but much, much more.
One day early in the spring of 2046 you will put a stepladder up against your house and open a little black capsule, smearing a thin line of carbon nanocells along the edge of a shingle. Do this is the morning and by the end of the day the nanocells will have grown to cover the entire shingle. The next day you will see two shingles covered and the day after that four shingles, then the next day eight and the day after that sixteen. In short order you will have a roof that is one big solar cell that will take your house off the grid.
But there’s more.
The nanocells will grow down over the siding and give your house programmable carbon nanaotube siding in all the colors of the rainbow. Birds and butterflies have brilliant colors but no pigments. The colors are made by refracting light. Your nanocells will do this too. Not only are carbon nanotubes stronger and lighter than steel, but they will give you nanoscopic prisms cut to give your siding any frequency of light. Your house will have all the brilliance of a peacocks tail. These prisms will be able to change their shape rapidly, giving the surface of your house the ablility to instantly change colors and patterns. These prisims will give you any pattern at all, even a fractal paisley. This will be very popular in San Francisco.
You will never have to hang Christmas lights again. Just will it so with the carbon nanocell computers in your head and by WiFi you will make lights appear all over your house. You will even make animated images appear. The Peanuts gang will pop up and go ice skating over the front of your house and decorate that forlorn little pine tree. Of course you will have to pay the licensing fee for the images to the Charles Schulz estate. If you don’t like that idea, you can select a pattern from Microsoft that gives you Santa Claus and his reindeer flying non-stop all the way around your house. At Easter you can have the bunny hopping around your house as he hides eggs, or you can have Moses leading the children of Israel between the towering waves of the Red Sea. On the Fourth of July you can turn your entire house into a giant American flag waving in the breeze, or you can display the Battle of Bunker Hill or the D-day landing at Normandy.
As your nanocells grow down into the foundation of your house, they will pick up atoms of silicon and calcium from the soil to make silicones or CaCo3. Then you can have a foundation of limestone blocks with weather stripping along the cellar windows. On a sunny day in Arizona you can turn that limestone into marble and grow a roccoco palace.
Yes your house will add rooms, then stories and excavate a wine cellar. You’ll even grow a new car in your garage from blueprints downloaded from Ford or GM. You’ll also grow a hydrolysis unit to split water into hydrogen and oxygen to fuel that new car.
In the kitchen threads of nanocells coming down from the roof will grow a replicator to give you any food you want.
In your bedroom closet new clothes will grow from downloaded patterns. You will have haute couture for 99 cents for a gown or a tuxedo.
The only fly in the ointment is that we have to wait until 2046 for these nanocells. By 2021 robots will put everybody out of work and there will be great social unrest. If Republicans control the government then they will let unemployment benefits run out in 26 weeks and then society will collapse.
Great hordes of the unemployed will roam the countryside attacking the mansions of the 1%. We won’t make it to the singularity at this rate.
The only thing to keep the country going will be to make the robots pay unemployment taxes to support the workers they put on unemployment. And yes the robots will have to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes too. Why not? Everbody will have to be on Medicare in 2021. With no jobs there will be no medical insurance.
The future all depends on the political philosophy of the party in power at the time.
by Marcos Marin
jobs… hahahahahaha
I was going to wish Darpa could make Mr. Russel just shut up.. but I then realized this will remain sci fi forever… :-)
by Gorden Russell
If you don’t like what I write, just scroll down. The thread is infinitely expandable, so how much space am I wasting?
by Marcos Marin
What they perhaps could do however is try improving Mr.Russel sense of humor :) J/K dude, I like what you write, keep it up =)
by Gorden Russell
Marcos, why are you laughing at jobs? People have to work to support themselves. Unemployment is not funny.
by Marcos Marin
I like to laugh, you should try =)
anyway, I find it more reasonable that, after all the events you parrot there, people will start to perceive some of the illusions they are under. Also, you forgot to mention the 2036 meteor hitting earth =) have a nice day.
by Clinton Chard
I recommend you read “Economics in One Lesson” by Henry Hazzlit. Amazing read. Simple concepts. Unemployment and it’s causes would then be better understood and you would understand that robots could never jeopardize what we term unemployment as they would shoot production and efficiency to the point that we as a people would never need to work, and that all of our possessions would be produced by robots and not people freeing them to pursue what they wanted not what they had to in order to “make money”.
by John Doe
A bio/nanotechnological cure for human psychological suffering, elevation of the capacity for pleasure and motivation, and the recalibration of the hedonic treadmill.
by Gorden Russell
To John Doe,
By the time we have carbon nanocell computers floating through our brains we will have mapped out all the functions of every neuron. We will re-wire the brain with nanocells to do away with depression, schizophrenia, and dementia.
The nanocells will also clean away fatty plaque in arteries to prevent stroke and heart disease.
by Gorden Russell
Also to John Doe,
About the recalibration of the hedonic treadmill…this does worry me.
People will hack into the programming of the nanocells in your head. They will download open-source programs to duplicate the experience of addictive drugs in the brain. A lot of people will be stoned burn-outs from this.
Of course even without programmed drug experience, people will be on the hedonic treadmill with virtual reality gaming.
by jon
FTL, Gravity in space, replicator and teleportation.
by Gorden Russell
To jon,
Gravity in space is called acceleration. You need a fusion powered ion drive to give you some gravity. But for a full one g of gravity, you will need a linnear accelerator the size of a mountain. Of course, robots can build this with the metals they take from asteroids.
If robotic mining ships haul back asteroids to Lagrange point five, a single von Neumann machine can build copies of itself. After these robots double their numbers 29 times there will be over five hundred million robots. These robots will also be doubling the number of mining ships, so there will be a constant stream of asteroids being hauled back to lunar orbit.
Just check out the Wikipedia entries for von Neumann, the National Ignition Facility, and ion drive. Oh, and look up linnear accelerators too. Just highlight and Google what I’ve entered here.
by Chrispium
Gravity can also be made by spinning the spaceship or station, like in A space odyssey 2001. That’s a Von Braun spacestation with internal gravity.
Once set to spinning no more fuel is needed. Very economical.
by Gary M
The U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701E and all the technology that goes along with it.
by Bob Stine
A light saber.
by Randy
A cure for inflammatory bowel disease, I guess from nanobots in the body combating all forms of illness.
by Gorden Russell
Yes, Randy, nanobots will cure anything that ails you.
by Anthea
Teleportation, hands-down. As long as it was affordable and reliable enough for daily commutes and visiting friends and family across the planet.
Bonus points if it made space exploration and interplanetary colonization easier!
by Clinton Chard
What if teleportation was scanning your current body and taking a snapshot of it’s pattern, then destroys the original, then recreates said pattern in a remote location, would you still be so excited about the journey?
by Editor
No, I’d opt for the premium plan, with the backup (local, offsite, and cloud) options and thresholds set for identity loss…. You?
by gaoptimize
A smart agent that would monitor all large (in agregate flow) financial transactions for crimes and fiduciary malfeasants. This and a $.01 fee/tax for all offers and bids on stock markets should radically improve the world and might prevent economic SHTF, but it is likely too late.
by Gorden Russell
You will have to be that smart agent, gaoptimize. When you have carbon nanocell computers in your head you will be able to go into the cloud and, thinking with the speed of all those computers, you will be able to check out everything on the web all at once. You will spot every trend and be able to flashtrade better than the computers of today. If you are the first stock trader to link up his brain to the cloud, you will start trading at the opening of the market one day and by closing time you will own everything.
by Gorden Russell
Yes, gaoptimize, a tax on trades would be a great help to the nation.
by Clinton Chard
Gordon, taxes are a moral wrong. It will never be morally right to steal funds from another person, ever, even if it is “legal” by the very institution that commits it. If I stole money from my neighbor and claimed it was taxes, the only way I would get away with it is if I were the State, and had the physical potential violence to back it up. Taxes do not help, they hurt. Read the book, “Economics in One Lesson” by Henry Hazzlit and you will see for yourself. Taxes do not create jobs, they transfer them inefficiently from one group to another at the point of a gun, if necessary. No one would pay their taxes if the government didn’t force them to, or at least I don’t know any that would.
by SpottedMarley
Yup.. friggin Holodecks and replicators! After those two things, what else do you need? You can make everything else with your replicator!
by Ian
The holodeck, please!
by Gorden Russell
To Spotted Marley and Ian,
Did you see today’s article on the XBox 720? With the doubling of computer power every 18 months that Moore’s Law gives us, it won’t take many doublings to get you to Virtual Reality. In six years there will be four doublings that will get you the XBox 11520. That could just be the holodeck you are looking for.
by Spikosauropod
Obviously strait forward immortality of the sort that would be possible with organ printing. Once you have that, you will have time to figure the rest out.
by Conrad Green
exactly
by Gorden Russell
To Spikosauropod,
You are onto something.
With nanocells in your bloodstream, you will print new organs in place, or just print repairs into the injured organs.
With nanocomputers in every cell of your body, all the damages of living will be fixed. As transcription errors in DNA are corrected and telomeres are re-raveled, you will stop aging and start “youthing.”
Of course when you have computers in your head, and all through your body, you will have the time to figure everything out. You will think with the speed of the cloud. You will read the entire Library of Congress in a few minutes, if not a few seconds.
But this will lead to a new problem. You will get bored in a New York nanosecond. You just might send your mind into the cloud and spend all your time in Virtual Reality.
by Conrad Green
immortality < if this is achieved then quantum entanglement, FTL , dimensional traveling, Nanites, Bio technologies exceed what they are now in a big way, exaflop computers with actual intelligence, robotics, androids, cyborgs, Mechs, spaceship architecture open sourced, human kind better at gene manipulation, metallurgy masters, tera forming, Portable wormhole technology, able to manipulate black holes, pretty much mix ghost n the shell with stargate
by Gorden Russell
To Conrad Green,
Be careful what you ask for. Advances in robotics will cause great social unrest in the near future. Read this Space.com article, “How Telerobotics Will Help Humanity Explore Space” Just cut and paste this URL:
http://www.space.com/15585-space-exploration-telerobotics-technology.html
Pay close attention to the section of the story subtitled “Brain Power.”
Here the manager of Space Robotics Technology, Brian Wilcox, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA says some exciting and chilling things.
He tells of a new wafer that has the equivalent computing power of 10 billion human neurons. Now apply Moore’s law, doubling that number every 18 months. In four doublings, over a period of six years, 10 billion becomes 160 billion.
Now the human brain has 100 billion neurons. So in six years robots will be able to do any job that humans can do, including building more robots.
This will make robots so cheap and plentiful that the job creators will fire everybody and replace them with robots.
If these robots don’t pay unemployment taxes, then society will collapse.
If unemployment benefits don’t last until age 65, then there will be angry hordes running riot, breaking up robots with axes and hammers.
Just find the Kurt Vonnegut novel, “Player Piano.”
by Chrispium
If you subsist on welfare till your 65, then you wont have any retirement funds. What will be needed is lifelong welfare.
by Brian Roberts
Short term: Organ printing, A.I Watson 2.0-3.0, and a giant leap in robotics. Room temp superconductivity.Oh and the Space Elevator.
Long term 50 years- forcefields, tractor beams, nanites, cryonics
100 years Teleportation,
by Laborious
A holo deck, high definition H.M.D.’s, photonic plasmonic quantum chip cubes that scale out and have electrical & light pipelines that goes threw it, more scales of 3D printing technology, rail gun like but maglev assisted lift off systems, nano robotic/packet bio-hacking, but then again it’s DARPA so we will be lucky if they get some of the therm optic body armor right. LOL
by MrFriendly
A pill that lets me eat as much pizza as I want without gaining weight.
by Gorden Russell
To MrFriendly
When you have nanocells throughout your body, they will monitor all your energy needs and just turn off your appetite when you’ve gotten enough. That way you will eat all the pizza you want and just stop eating before you get fat.
But if you still want to pig out, you can turn off the appetite control and just send your nanocells down to your intestines to cover the extra food with a membrane that keeps it from being digested.
But this will make for a very messy looking bowel movement. So just don’t look at it. The membrane will make the movement so clean that you won’t even have to wipe yourself. The messy looking stool will be wrapped up in the membrane, so your shit won’t even smell.
by Carl Brooks
lol
by RobinSongs
You can do that in Virtual Reality
by Bri
3D printing from an articulating robotic platform. Kind of like the Raven surgical device, but fully mobile. Each arm could extrude a different material. Carbon fiber, fiber glass,plastics, metal, etc. That way it could print a house or car or plane. Any macro scale device, not just small baubles, that today’s consumer 3D printers make. If we get autonomous cars together, why not flying cars to. Can’t trust a human to drive one, but a robotic one within a much more sophisticated FAA controlled air space would be excellent!
by Locke
Lets see.. Eternal youth, FTL travel, personal space ships and galactic peace?
by HwWobbe
Teleportation.
by Brian
A complete cure for hair loss.
by Adam
I could think of so many but the first one that comes to mind is a piece of tech from Stargate SG-1. It was a device that allowed you to manipulate DNA in real-time. The applications for such a device are mind-blowing. As long as caution and prudence were exercised, I also remember from the show they had a race called the Asgard, they cloned themselves new bodies each time one failed and transferred their minds into the new ones for generations ultimately causing their extinction.
by Chrispium
The Asgard only went extinct because the show had crappy writers.