black holes and gray matter. in one thousand tangos.

             

Popular Mechanics: 110 predictions for the next 110 years

2012—2022

Passwords will be obsolete. IBM says it will happen in five years. Who are we to disagree? Apple and Google are designing face-recognition software for cellphones. DARPA is researching the dynamics of keystrokes. Others are looking into retinal scans, voiceprints, and heartbeats. 

Drones will protect endangered species. Guarding at-risk animals from poachers with foot patrols is expensive and dangerous. This summer rangers in Nepal’s Chitwan National Park previewed a savvy solution: Hand-launched drones armed with cameras and GPS provided aerial surveillance of threatened Indian rhinos. 

Vegetarians and carnivores will dine together on synthetic meats. We’re not talking about tofu. We’re talking about nutritious, low-cost substitutes that look and taste just like the real thing. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has already invested in Beyond Meat, which makes plant-based chicken strips so convincing they almost fooled New York Times food writer Mark Bittman. 

2023—2062

Contact lenses will grant us Terminator vision. When miniaturization reaches its full potential, achieving superhuman eyesight will be as simple as placing a soft lens on your eye. Early prototypes feature wirelessly powered LEDs. But circuits and antennas can also be grafted onto flexible polymer, enabling zooming, night vision, and visible data fields. 

All 130 million books on the planet will be digitized. In 2010 Google planned to complete the job by decade’s end, but as of March it still had 110 million tomes to go, so we’re adding wiggle room. You might use the time to shop for storage, because given today’s options and the average size of an e-book (3 MB), you’ll need 124 3-terabyte drives to carry the library of humanity with you. It won’t fit into a backpack, but it’s small enough to schlep in a hockey bag. 

The refrigerator will place your grocery order.
The carpet will detect intruders and summon help if you fall.
Lawn sensors will tell you which part of your yard to fertilize.
The electric meter will monitor local power consumption and help you make full use of off-peak rates.

2063—2122

An ion engine will reach the stars. If you’re thinking of making the trip to Alpha Centauri, pack plenty of snacks. At 25.8 trillion miles, the voyage requires more than four years of travel at light speed, and you won’t be going nearly that fast. To complete the journey, you’ll have to rely on a scaled-up version of the engine on the Deep Space 1 probe, launched in 1998. Instead of liquid or solid fuel, the craft was propelled by ions of xenon gas accelerated by an electric field. 

Scientists will map the quadrillion connections between the brain’s neurons. Quadrillion sounds like a made-up number, but we assure you it’s real. Those connections hold the answers to questions about mental illness, learning, and the whole nature versus nurture issue. If every one of them were a penny, you could stack them and build a tower 963 million miles high. It would stretch past Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn and stop roughly halfway to Uranus. 

THE PM BRAIN TRUST SAYS:

WITHIN 20 YEARS…
Self-driving cars will hit the mainstream market. 
Battles will be waged without direct human participation (think robots or unmanned aerial vehicles). 
The first fully functional brain-controlled bionic limb will arrive. 

WITHIN 30 YEARS…
All-purpose robots will help us with household chores. 
Space travel will become as affordable as a round-the-world plane ticket. 
Soldiers will use exoskeletons to enhance battlefield performance. 

WITHIN 40 YEARS…
Nanobots will perform medical procedures inside our bodies. 

WITHIN 50 YEARS…
We will have a colony on Mars. 
Doctors will successfully transplant a lab-grown human heart.
We will fly the friendly skies without pilots onboard.
And renewable energy sources will surpass fossil fuels in electricity generation. 

WITHIN 60 YEARS… 
Digital data (texts, songs, etc.) will be zapped directly into our brains. 
We will activate the first fusion power plant. 
And we will wage the first battle in space. 

WITHIN 100 YEARS…
The last gasoline-powered car will come off the assembly line. 

Elon Musk, said to be the model for Tony Stark, wants to die on Mars “For those who don’t read the financial press or the gossip blogs, Musk is a 41-year-old entrepreneur who grew up in South Africa. At 15, he migrated to Canada, worked on farms and at a lumber mill and then got into Queen’s University in Ontario. After two years, he transferred to Penn, earning degrees in economics and physics. While there, as he recently told Jon Stewart, he concluded that the three areas that would most transform humanity were the Internet, sustainable energy and space exploration. He dropped out of a graduate physics program at Stanford to help start an Internet map and directory company called Zip2, which was sold to Compaq for more than $300 million. He took his share of that money and helped create PayPal, serving for a time as its chief executive. When that was sold, he poured his share of his money into SpaceX, a space exploration company; Tesla, an electric car company; SolarCity, a solar power company; and Everdream, a data-center software firm. SpaceX is the first private company to send a rocket into space. Already profitable, it has a long line of orders to take things into space. Tesla is selling its second model for about $55,000 each. Musk decided to revolutionize three industries all at once and is sort of doing it. His net worth is estimated to be about $2 billion. Musk also told Businessweek about two other project designs he is working on. The first is something called the Hyperloop, a tube capable of taking people from downtown Los Angeles to downtown San Francisco in 30 minutes. The second is a vertical lift-off supersonic passenger jet that would surpass Boeing. He also hopes to open up a space colony on Mars within 10 or 15 years.” Temerity at the Top

Elon Musk, said to be the model for Tony Stark, wants to die on Mars

“For those who don’t read the financial press or the gossip blogs, Musk is a 41-year-old entrepreneur who grew up in South Africa. At 15, he migrated to Canada, worked on farms and at a lumber mill and then got into Queen’s University in Ontario.

After two years, he transferred to Penn, earning degrees in economics and physics. While there, as he recently told Jon Stewart, he concluded that the three areas that would most transform humanity were the Internet, sustainable energy and space exploration.

He dropped out of a graduate physics program at Stanford to help start an Internet map and directory company called Zip2, which was sold to Compaq for more than $300 million.

He took his share of that money and helped create PayPal, serving for a time as its chief executive. When that was sold, he poured his share of his money into SpaceX, a space exploration company; Tesla, an electric car company; SolarCity, a solar power company; and Everdream, a data-center software firm.

SpaceX is the first private company to send a rocket into space. Already profitable, it has a long line of orders to take things into space. Tesla is selling its second model for about $55,000 each. Musk decided to revolutionize three industries all at once and is sort of doing it. His net worth is estimated to be about $2 billion.

Musk also told Businessweek about two other project designs he is working on. The first is something called the Hyperloop, a tube capable of taking people from downtown Los Angeles to downtown San Francisco in 30 minutes. The second is a vertical lift-off supersonic passenger jet that would surpass Boeing. He also hopes to open up a space colony on Mars within 10 or 15 years.”

Temerity at the Top

Funding cuts threaten U.S. science innovation | LA Times

“On Aug. 5, I was among those who witnessed the rover Curiosity landing on Mars in real time at NASA’s Caltech-managed Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The excitement was overwhelming: The one-ton Mars Science Laboratory broke through the Red Planet’s atmosphere, slowed its speed from 13,000 mph to almost zero and touched down. One glimpse of those first images from more than 100 million miles away demonstrated America’s leadership in innovation.

Curiosity — the rover and the concept — is what science is all about: the quest to reveal the unknown. America’s past investment in basic science and engineering, and its skill at nurturing the quest, is what led to the Mars triumph, and it is what undergirds U.S. leadership in today’s world. But now, decreases in science funding and increases in its bureaucracy threaten that leadership position.

After World War II, scientific research in the U.S. was well supported. In the 1960s, when I came to America, the sky was the limit, and this conducive atmosphere enabled many of us to pursue esoteric research that resulted in breakthroughs and Nobel prizes. American universities were magnets to young scientists and engineers from around the globe. The truth is that no one knew then what the effect of that research would be; no one could have predicted and promised all that resulted. After all, it is unpredictability that is the fabric of discovery. 

In much of academia today, however, curiosity-driven research is no longer looked on favorably. Research proposals must specifically address the work’s “broad relevance to society” and provide “transformative solutions” even before research begins. Professors are writing more proposals chasing less research money, which reduces the time available for creative thinking. And with universities facing rising costs generally, professors are more and more involved in commercial enterprises, which may not always push basic research forward. Even faculty tenure may be driven less by how good one is at science than how good one is at fundraising.

These constraints and practices raise the question: Would a young Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman or Linus Pauling be attracted to science today? Would they be able to pursue their inquiries into fundamental questions?”

Read on.

Michael Benson

1. The cracked and curving Martian rift valleys in the center are called Noctis Labyrinthus, or Night Labyrinth. Two dormant volcanoes are visible: Arsia Mons, top right, and Pavonis Mons, bottom right.

2. The largest canyon in the solar system, Valles Marineris, on Mars, is almost 2,500 miles long — nearly as long as the continental United States is wide. A ground fog hugs the canyon floor. Haze in the thin Martian atmosphere is visible on the horizon.

John Grunsfeld of NASA: “We’re going to get indications, not in real time, but as quickly as possible, and the reason we don’t have real time is that it takes about 14 minutes for the signal to get from Mars to Earth at the speed of light.”

Stephen Colbert: “So… fourteen minutes later we know what’s happened in Mars. Actually faster than NBC can tell us what’s happening in London?”

— Colbert on NASA’s mission to Mars

©2011 Kateoplis