Once set to spinning no more fuel is needed. Very economical.

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.

[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.

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.”

I was going to wish Darpa could make Mr. Russel just shut up.. but I then realized this will remain sci fi forever… :-)

https://lasers.llnl.gov/

Then read the Wikipedia entry on it. The people there expect to do something great by October.

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.”

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.

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.

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.