On the cusp of the technological age - what do you think is coming over the horizon?

The fact that US have alien technology hidden away is a secret only for those who do not want to search for truth.
This is also the reason why so many in the know have left ATS so it become a political shoutbox.
Sooner or later Trump will get in trouble with the environmentalists of the world and with his back against the wall
the president will play his alien trump card and we can kiss goodbye to social structure as we know it because this
will be a whole new ballgame none of us can image.
When i look at the global warming issue and the fact that earth should be cold now as we are furthest away from the sun on the 26000 year cycle tells me environmentalist will win because we must prepare for a warmer climate the next 13000 year. Kind of funny that the carbon based industrial revolution saved the planet from freezing.
This is just a rant from my side, i would need a lot of pages to explain my view entirely and to include the Q.

a reply to: Norge

"The fact that US have alien technology hidden away is a secret only for those who do not want to search for truth."

It's not a fact through, definitive proof beyond reasonable doubt has yet to materialize or be released.

If Trump cant get his head around global warming theirs not much chance of him addressing the alien issue, unless its illegal Mexican aliens.

originally posted by: jellyrev
a reply to: SaturnFX

I think we may be farther than that

Right, but temper our scientific ambitions with the reality of capitalism wanting a rollout session to maximize each level of tech. so..cripple the true advancment to about 1/10th of the possibility is my cynical analysis.

I think however in 25 years, AR/VR (it will be one in the same..all in one headset) will be soo immersive and lightweight that it will be the main source of entertainment in many western cities..and on a huge rise in places like China that wants to sedate the population.
Virtual working will be a thing..avatar design will be a lucrative job for some, a whole industry on custom AR/VR homes and having a room in a standard house dedicated strictly to VR will be common, slowly replacing the entertainment centers.
What a fantastic time we are on the cusp of (and in some ways already started to enter..just a bit constricted and version 0.1)

originally posted by: SaturnFX
Virtual working will be a thing..avatar design will be a lucrative job for some, a whole industry on custom AR/VR homes and having a room in a standard house dedicated strictly to VR will be common, slowly replacing the entertainment centers.
What a fantastic time we are on the cusp of (and in some ways already started to enter..just a bit constricted and version 0.1)

This is a lot closer than you think. VR suits like PrioVR have already hit the market, and they allow for cheap tracking of people in VR space. There's basically two issues to VR: The first is that the capture area is limited, you can never go outside of it's bounds. That makes movement in a wide open world difficult. The Vive got around this by making a teleporter to go along with their VR but that ends up breaking the immersion. Others have gotten around it with treadmills you can walk on that go in all directions. That's what you'll probably see going forward because it allows for an unlimited range of movement.

The hardware is a bit costly, but it's already where it needs to be. It just needs software at this point. A VR system can sit in the corner of your room right now.

a reply to: AnkhMorpork

The very first items will come from the material sciences. It will be 2-D materials. Some are already starting to be used (graphene in textiles and packaging) while others are being thought up like "white graphene" (boron nitride). Then they will be variants of layered 2-D materials (vanDer Waal's heterostructures).

The other thing we will see in the very new future are metal-ceramics. Especially chemically bonded phosphate ceramic as this is the best anti-corrosion coating. From light poles to drain pipes, any where you need to stop corrosion or rust this stuff is going to show up.

Everything else needs some foundation to build upon. It is happening now. Electricity storage at the grid-level, energy distribution (15% of the electricity shoved down the wire is lost), and more efficient turbines. The last one will be online this year at a demo plant in Texas that has a closed ignition system where they will burn fuel and oxygen together to collect the CO2, add more heat and pressure to make it go supercritical, to turn a first of its kind SCO2 turbine. If nothing else comes out of this demo plant I would bet dollars to donuts all utility operators will salivate over the SCO2 turbine.

On the computing side, you need terahertz computing/communication. We are coming to the end of Moore's Law with current silicon chips. Then who knows? Maybe light, nanoscale chips running carbon nanotube switches, probably a hybrid of the two?

I hope there is a totally disruptive technology that stops the world in its tracks. Completely change everything especially the current mindset. Our wasteful society needs to turn the ship around or it will be the Mad Max/Hunger Games utopian future of the nihilists.

ETA: Good article about the end of Moore's law at The Guardian - Vanishing point: the rise of the invisible computer

originally posted by: andy06shake
a reply to: AnkhMorpork

I would like to see a space elevator being launched and constructed.

The technology is just about there and such a device would pave the way as to us being able to launch both Man and materials into low Earth orbit cost effectively.

Essentially paving the way as to the eventual colonization of low Earth orbit, and possibly beyond.

I would pay to ride that elevator to the Space Hotel. It would be like Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey in the sense that it would spin to simulate gravity, but with zero gravity in the middle for playtime.

I think there will be some earth-shattering things happening in the realm of machine intelligence in the near future Unless it turns out that the kind of magic-bullet like form of intelligence we envision is actually impossible. for example it could be that machines will suffer from mental illness, or maybe human intelligence is really just a random collection of tricks, and that general intelligence doesn't exist.

But I think it is much more likely that there is some kind of fundamental alogorithm to intellignece, and that when we discover how it works, then we'll be able to make machines which far exceed anything we humans could ever do.

Will it still be a human civilization, or will it belong to the machines?

originally posted by: Aazadan

originally posted by: SaturnFX
Virtual working will be a thing..avatar design will be a lucrative job for some, a whole industry on custom AR/VR homes and having a room in a standard house dedicated strictly to VR will be common, slowly replacing the entertainment centers.
What a fantastic time we are on the cusp of (and in some ways already started to enter..just a bit constricted and version 0.1)

This is a lot closer than you think. VR suits like PrioVR have already hit the market, and they allow for cheap tracking of people in VR space. There's basically two issues to VR: The first is that the capture area is limited, you can never go outside of it's bounds. That makes movement in a wide open world difficult. The Vive got around this by making a teleporter to go along with their VR but that ends up breaking the immersion. Others have gotten around it with treadmills you can walk on that go in all directions. That's what you'll probably see going forward because it allows for an unlimited range of movement.

The hardware is a bit costly, but it's already where it needs to be. It just needs software at this point. A VR system can sit in the corner of your room right now.

I got the Rift. I am all up on the AR/VR news..been making 3d mesh for "vr worlds" before headsets (things like secondlife, unity engine, other things). I am excited, but its gonna need a couple decades to mature into something profound..much like the computer of the 80s vs 00s is leaps and bounds different

Amazing times we live in either way..I discuss the future with interest, but what we have today already isn't unappreciated..the smart phone, the tablet, etc..all these things were childhood dreams of mine watching the original star trek.

a reply to: SaturnFX

Tricorders are coming. I hope they call them that.

originally posted by: SaturnFX
I got the Rift. I am all up on the AR/VR news..been making 3d mesh for "vr worlds" before headsets (things like secondlife, unity engine, other things). I am excited, but its gonna need a couple decades to mature into something profound..much like the computer of the 80s vs 00s is leaps and bounds different

Amazing times we live in either way..I discuss the future with interest, but what we have today already isn't unappreciated..the smart phone, the tablet, etc..all these things were childhood dreams of mine watching the original star trek.

5 or 6 years ago now, as my capstone for one of my degrees I ended up making a simulation for a real estate company. Built a 3d model of one of their homes, then using a motion capture suit, a large capture area, and some glasses we were able to let people wander the house and visualize it, all built off of just the homes blueprints.

The technology has drastically improved since then. Actually in one of my classes for my current degree (again the capstone, go figure) we're building a multi person VR simulation with head/body/hand tracking, interactable objects, and so on. The big differences between a few years ago and now are hand tracking, putting multiple people in the same area, and of course cost. The system I used a couple years ago involved a $100,000 motion capture system and about $10,000 in software and that was to get either 2 people, or 1 person and a bunch of objects in a room. The system we're using now is something like $2500 in software and $20,000 in hardware to put up to 20 people in the same room at a time.

It's really cool, as part of the proof of concept, I took a small raid from an MMO and reenacted it with VR in Unity and we were able to play it out.

There's a few issues, mostly logistically with having that many people in a room and them not running into each other, but products like the Virtuix Omni are going to fix that.

Exponential leaps in the advancement of artificial intelligence, robotics and ultimately the merging of related advancements with the human being itself.

Inevitable evolution.

self edited

A lot of people have been pointing to the manipulation of the constituents of matter and everything from 3D printing to nanobot "construction" technology perhaps even combined with new types of matter and material at the chemical level, and for sure that's going to be a big part of it, like micro-macro scale manufacturing processes that are capable of building anything out of anything at the atomic level.

In addiction to and unpinning that concept, I think the big breakthrough that will give rise to this new industrial revolution (at scales we can hardly imagine both very small and very large) will involve a breakthrough in our understanding of fields and field manipulation including the electromagnetic field and the fields involved in the very makeup and existence of matter and energy itself in all of it's forms, from the atomic or nuclear to the gravitational field.

I think we'll come up with a unified field theory and GUT which will not only reveal the nature of these fields and forces as being manifestations of one field (some sort of quantum gravity field), but we'll unleash the era of free energy, and the computer and robotic manipulation of this field in all of its forms with a level of sophistication that's just to the nth degree and very difficult to imagine.

In other words, we could send a probe to the nearest star and if there's no life, disassemble and reassemble a planet or a giant spaceship, atom by atom, bit by bit, same thing with our own orbital and lunar cities. All that's needed is the material, say via a captured asteroid, and the self-replicating blueprint does the rest.

And then in a few hundred years we might even get into astroengineering and build a Dyson sphere out of an inner planet and then use that energy to drive von Neumann probes throughout the galaxy.

NASA should begin by sending small robotic vehicles to every single body in our own solar system, and drop a boat on the liquid mercury of that moon of Jupiter, the possibilities are endless.

Once we know how to disassemble and reassemble matter from the ground up and have access to limitless energy perhaps via the quantum field vacuum, and in no time flat we'll have combed our own solar system, found life there, outside of Earth, then IT'S AWAY in a million different directions, only to be bypassed within a 100 years by FTL ships.

I think it'll be a combination of field technology (by which matter is manipulated in a matter/energy exchange) combined with machine intelligence and robotics.


Next thing you know, you look up at the moon and there are no more craters because it's covered in a giant city, as the pilot project for future adventures. Theoretically, once matter and energy is fully understood, we could create a field bubble on the bright side of the moon and artificially terraform the surface beneath it. For added sunlight a whole array of mirrors could direct light to the surface. Anything would be possible.

I think that the big breakthrough is coming and that it will involve a combination of AI and of micro and macro-level "manufacturing" which employs tiny field manipulations to reorganize the structure at the atomic level, with self replicating capability perhaps limited or constrained by levels of scale just to be on the safe side (avoid being eaten by our own creation, while setting it loose on the universe).

We're going to have to be careful and cautious I think, but at the same time the possibilities.... that trip to the moon we all dreamed of as children.. a holiday at the Space Hotel that's actually affordable because of the magnitude of the growing city in Earth orbit which will become visible from the ground, particularly if we are able to build space elevators.

And then the new city on the moon, much more than a "base" will become visible, and grow.

Can you imagine?

Far out man.. lol

But seriously, I think these technologies combine in a way that will function as a bridge to putting humanity in space, if only to the moon and back (sounds like fun!) to begin with, as our stepping stone to the stars.

That's what surfaced for me anyway, that idea.

Best regards,

Ankh

Great thread!

I forsee the following in the next 100 years:
- Fusion power, ending disputes over energy
- Computers simulating the human brain
- Strong AI with higher than human intelligence
- A final understanding of the laws of physics
- Replicators capable of producing pretty much anything, ending disputes over resources
- A one world goverment and general peace
- A major reduction in religious adherents
- Computers simulating a large environmental reality you can upload your brain into and live as long as there is power, indistinguishable from real life
- Robots performing most tasks, leaving humans free to be creative
- Robotic mining of the solar system
- Artificial bodies with uploaded human brains
- No return, universe wide interstellar travel at sub light speed leading to humans populating the universe. Time passage for the travellers would be approx 1 month per light year. If the travellers have robotic bodies they may be able to 'pause' for the duration.
- Hopefully faster that 10Mbit internet in rural England

I suppose what will happen beyond 100 years is too fantastic to imagine.

As it is, an additional planet will be needed to maintain just basic needs. Even more will be needed to make technofix fantasies possible.