Ch-ch-ch-changes
Barack Obama is sworn in as the President of the United States, and the word on everyone’s mind is Change.
At the start of the year, Edge.org asked 151 thinkers: What will change everything? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?
The answers are wide-ranging, fascinating, and sometimes mind-boggling.
We will see the first artificial life form on Earth (J. Craig Venter, who’s working on that, has announced transplanting information from one genome into another. Meaning, your dog becomes your cat) and discover life on other planets…or extraterrestrial life on Earth (You will be found out at last). Laboratory Earth colonies will be formed for simulating conditions on galactic trips.
Photo: “No thanks, I don’t want to be a dog.”
We will be able to delineate the nature of talent (No matter what Malcolm Gladwell says, talent is mysterious and hard work over decades will only get you so far). Someone will prove the Riemann Hypothesis.It will be possible to chemically or electronically remove humans’ ability to kill or harm other human beings. (Uh-oh. Alarm bells. Remember that Star Trek episode where Captain Kirk split into Good Kirk and Bad Kirk. And Brave New World.) The average life span will increase to 125 years, or 150.
Nanotechnology will enable us to manufacture all our material needs at trivial cost, without human labor, without waste. Other molecular-scale devices will repair and rejuvenate our cells.
Climate will change our worldview. There will be the first major upgrade of the human brain since the Pleistocene. We will be able to control virtual models of our own bodies directly with our brain. Radiotelepathy—the direct communication of feelings and thought from brain to brain—will become possible. (We already have that in the Philippines. It’s called chismis.)
We will learn to make phenotypes. Laptop quantum computers will become commonplace.
True human nature will be unmasked. (Aiiieee!)
There will be a Malthusian information famine. (We can already see it coming.)
Another universe will be discovered IN our universe.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
January 21st, 2009 at 04:18
Change? I just want for the world to have a total and satisfying cure for both Types I and II diabetes, without the deterioration of body systems and functions.
My heart bleeds when I see toddlers/juveniles suffering from Type I.
January 21st, 2009 at 12:18
Amazing that intelligent scientists can be so… naive. Sure science gave us a lot of wonderful stuff, but it also gave us the hydrogen bomb, neutron bomb, VX poison gas, biological weapons, white phosphorus bombs, etc. not to mention air and water pollution. (If anthropogenic global warming were true, we could also blame science for that one.)
Im reminded of that story I read about a dinner between, I forget, probably Paul Dirac, and Edward Teller. Teller asked him what he was working on and Dirac said he was working on neutrinos. After listening a bit, to Dirac’s horror, Teller took a pen and on a napkin started calculating the possible yield of a neutrino bomb.
January 23rd, 2009 at 03:44
i’m actually afraid we might get to see a third world war during our lifetime.
January 25th, 2009 at 10:36
Timothy Taylor’s bit reminded me of the two cultural/ political dichotomies that we as a nation have failed to recognize: liberal-conservative.