It’s pretty common these days for me to read something and react with “Wow, that’s like something from a science fiction story I read X years ago”. In addition to this being common, I’ve also noticed that X is decreasing.
Some examples, just of things I read in the last day or two:
- Teleportation. OK, admittedly, it’s a very low bandwidth channel, that teleports across a meter so far, but that whole “yeah, we really can transmit information without crossing the intervening space with a signal” thing is the big breakthrough. I don’t need to explain why teleportation, even teleportation of information is a science fiction idea, do I? And I’ve read quite a few stories with this particular form of teleportation as an FTL communications medium, with the logistical issues of requiring a supply of endpoint specific uncollapsed qubits to be carried at both ends of a potential communication channel. Academic paper is here. (As an aside, if you are skeptical of the importance of this, especially on any kind of “pre-encoded information” basis, you should make sure you understand the implications of Bell’s theorem for this experiment.)
- Robots. Shape-shifting, self-repairing robots. Robots that power themselves by eating organics. Yeah, there’s no possibility for a disastrous outcome there. Hell, throw in self-replicating robots and you get the complete trifecta. I just hope the programmers are being sensible.
- Fusion-explosion powered sublight spaceships, the reach a measureable fraction of c? Yeah, that’s something I’ve read about. Still, this seems a little far off when the governments of the world are focused on keeping us all from noticing the giant game of Emperor’s New Clothes that we call the global economy.
- Datacube! Stanford researchers bring us closer to science fiction’s ubiquitous three-dimensional personal storage technology, the datacube or data crystal, by developing a means of holographically storing information at a density of 35 bits per electron. Yeah, per electron. Bite that 1-bit-per-atom lower bound. Also, if you don’t find the idea of recording information in the interference patterns of electrons-what-are-acting-like-waves dead cool, then you’re not my kind of geek. I get a little charge out of just saying “Electronic Quantum Holography”.
- Essentially waste-free nuclear power. Using fusion to clean up the dangerous by-products of fission seems very neat, and really anytime you can talk about containing radiation in magnetic bottles, you’re doing something right. I’m biased about nuclear power, having spent time working at AECL, but to get to the utopian futures we need more, cheaper power, and less carbon output. Nuclear is a great option for that, except for the waste issue, and if we can close that…
- Recreation of extinct animals by cloning from preserved DNA. Using this to bring back Ubuntu mascots: cool. Using this to bring back dinosaurs for study: cooler. Using this to add any credibility to Michael Crichton: feh.
- Stem-cell treatments reversing MS, and the door maybe being open to a similar solution to many autoimmune problems? Doctors doing what is essentially a complete immune system transplant? Man, that’s cool. Worried about the supply of stem cells? Well, we could clone them, or maybe even find a way to make normal cells act like them.
- While I could keep this up for a couple of hours just with things I’ve read lately, I think I’ll close with one just for the people who know who the Howard Families are: The Methuselah Foundation.
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