{"id":2267,"date":"2009-02-02T23:45:55","date_gmt":"2009-02-03T03:45:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/?p=2267"},"modified":"2009-02-03T00:48:34","modified_gmt":"2009-02-03T04:48:34","slug":"reality-shock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/02\/reality-shock\/","title":{"rendered":"Reality Shock"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s pretty common these days for me to read something and react with &#8220;Wow, that&#8217;s like something from a science fiction story I read X years ago&#8221;. In addition to this being common, I&#8217;ve also noticed that X is decreasing.<\/p>\n<p>Some examples, just of things I read in the last day or two:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/view\/generic\/id\/40133\/title\/Quantum_information_teleported_between_distant_atoms\">Teleportation<\/a>. OK, admittedly, it&#8217;s a very low bandwidth channel, that teleports across a meter so far, but that whole &#8220;yeah, we really can transmit information without crossing the intervening space with a signal&#8221; thing is the big breakthrough. I don&#8217;t need to explain why teleportation, even teleportation of information is a science fiction idea, do I? And I&#8217;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. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/cgi\/content\/abstract\/323\/5913\/486\">Academic paper is here<\/a>. (As an aside, if you are skeptical of the importance of this, especially on any kind of &#8220;pre-encoded information&#8221; basis, you should make sure you understand the implications of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bell%27s_theorem\">Bell&#8217;s theorem<\/a> for this experiment.)<\/li>\n<li>Robots. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/mg19826531.200-shapeshifting-robots-take-form.html\">Shape-shifting, self-repairing robots<\/a>. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.networkworld.com\/community\/node\/37896\">Robots that power themselves by eating organics<\/a>. Yeah, there&#8217;s no possibility for a disastrous outcome there. Hell, throw in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.news.cornell.edu\/stories\/may05\/selfrep.ws.html\">self-replicating robots<\/a> and you get the complete trifecta. I just hope <a href=\"http:\/\/xkcd.com\/534\/\">the programmers are being sensible<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.centauri-dreams.org\/?p=5691\">Fusion-explosion powered sublight spaceships<\/a>, the reach a measureable fraction of c? Yeah, that&#8217;s something I&#8217;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&#8217;s New Clothes that we call the global economy.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/news-service.stanford.edu\/news\/2009\/january28\/small-012809.html\">Datacube<\/a>! Stanford researchers bring us closer to science fiction&#8217;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&#8217;t find the idea of recording information in the interference patterns of electrons-what-are-acting-like-waves dead cool, then you&#8217;re not my kind of geek. I get a little charge out of just saying &#8220;Electronic Quantum Holography&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.utexas.edu\/news\/2009\/01\/27\/nuclear_hybrid\/\">Essentially waste-free nuclear power<\/a>. 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&#8217;re doing something right. I&#8217;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&#8230;<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/scienceandtechnology\/science\/sciencenews\/4409958\/Extinct-ibex-is-resurrected-by-cloning.html\">Recreation of extinct animals by cloning from preserved DNA<\/a>. 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.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/dn16509-multiple-sclerosis-reversed-with-stem-cell-therapy.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&#038;nsref=online-news\">Stem-cell treatments reversing MS<\/a>, 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&#8217;s cool. Worried about the supply of stem cells? Well, we could <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.wired.com\/wiredscience\/2009\/02\/human-clones-ap.html\">clone them<\/a>, or maybe even find a way to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nyu.edu\/public.affairs\/releases\/detail\/2465\">make normal cells act like them<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>While I could keep this up for a couple of hours just with things I&#8217;ve read lately, I think I&#8217;ll close with one just for the people who know who the Howard Families are: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.methuselahfoundation.org\/\">The Methuselah Foundation<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p class=\"excerpt\">It&#8217;s pretty common these days for me to read something and react with &#8220;Wow, that&#8217;s like something from a science fiction story I read X years ago&#8221;. In addition to this being common, I&#8217;ve also noticed that X is decreasing. Some examples, just of things I read in the last day or two: Teleportation. OK, admittedly, it&#8217;s a very low&hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/02\/reality-shock\/\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[92,189,196,67],"class_list":["post-2267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-academic-papers","tag-alternate-reality","tag-nanotechnology","tag-science","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-Az","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2267"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2269,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2267\/revisions\/2269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}