Why Don’t We Invent It Tomorrow?

Why Don’t We Invent It Tomorrow?

In the NYTimes book review blog, David Itzkoff takes a look at a new book devoted to predicting which 'science fiction' technologies may really fly some day. The author is Michio Kaku, one of the inventors of string theory, so he bears a hearing. His picks include light sabers, invisibility and force fields.

I think the key is going to be nanotechnology. We can put enormous amounts of energy inside a very small volume, at the level of atoms. You can use almost any energy source to energize a laser: we use chemical explosions, electron beams, hydrogen bombs, X-rays. In the future, I suspect if we have a nano-battery — that is, a battery which stores energy at the atomic level, in the same way that gasoline is a concentration of sunlight over millions of years — we may be able to create a portable ray gun. There’s nothing in laws of physics preventing it. But we can’t even get a battery to power a car with the same efficiency as gasoline. That’s how primitive we are.”

I say the hell with invisibility and the light saber. My pick is free energy, and teleportation. What should in your opinion should be invented first?


papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com...

Teleportion has always been a dream of mine.

In 1993 an international group of six scientists, including IBM Fellow Charles H. Bennett, confirmed the intuitions of the majority of science fiction writers by showing that perfect teleportation is indeed possible in principle, but only if the original is destroyed.

Australian scientists said Monday they had successfully "teleported" a laser beam encoded with data, breaking it up and reconstructing an exact replica a yard away.

Thats my pick!

Already being discussed here:
www.belowtopsecret.com...

and here:
www.belowtopsecret.com...

I say we forget about the light saber for sure, you just can't stop the energy beam 3 - 4 feet from the energy source without it hitting a target.

Teleportation can't be accomplished with our technology without destroying the original particle being teleported and then imprinting that data on a new particle.

Would you still be you when you came out the other end ???

I'd love to order pizza and just have it appear in a box in my kitchen, sort of like a food replicator on Star Trek. But a million mice, a thousand dogs, hundreds of apes, and then 5 years of human testing would have to happen before I'd step into a Transporter.


There is a lot of work being done on invisibility, cloaking, and stealth type stuff.
My bet is that this technology already exists at a far higher level than the public is aware of.

Teleportion is quite dangerous.It is difficult to convert a guy into energy,and more difficult to conver it back. A tiny flaw or small mistake may kill him.

Yeah, invisibility will be the first of these discoveries. Work has been underway for quite awhile, and from what i understand they do exist today. Invisibility cloaks basically bend light away from themselves so the observer simply doesn't see it, but see's behind it. Interesting stuff.

science.howstuffworks.com...

Originally posted by Master_Wii
I say the hell with invisibility and the light saber. My pick is free energy, and teleportation. What should in your opinion should be invented first?

The biggest problem seems to be with creating small but powerful energy generators. Not necessarily free energy generators, because that could be possible but if you have to build something the size of the Grand Canyon to get it, what's the point?

I think it would be good to develop small, safe nuclear batteries that can be used to power things on an individual level. Cars, houses, robots, bionics, appliances, etc. Our current batteries work pretty good, but they're horribly environmentally messy to create, and don't last very long.

Unfortunately, there are some basic limitations of electrical and nuclear physics that hold us back. There are certain constants in field strength and propagation that make it really tough. And radioactivity is poisonous. It's a bit beyond our power to build a small, relatively inexpensive fusion or free energy reactor the size of a basketball we can use to run our cars. It would be nice, though.

[edit on 14-3-2008 by Nohup]