Exoskeletons like Ripley’s in Alien. We’ve got smaller ones, but I want to pilot a walking fork lift.
Pipe dream - battlemechs aka mechwarrior (not pacific rim). Very impractical but I want one anyway. Yes, I saw the robot fighting league by Megabots. I have their poster.
A lot of black mirror stuff.
Apologies for the blanket pessimism but the last decades darkened my view.
living in a self-sustaining ecological-aware community that values freedom and diversity and everyone having their needs met
Vaccines. Maybe in 100 years we’ll even be able to eliminate measles…again.
Railguns, there already exist prototypes that destroy themselves. So close!
I thought we already had rail guns on ships?
We currently carry tricorders in our pockets. I can see a medical tricorder being ubiquitous for field medics, ships, and the like within 100 years.
Tricorders, cellphones are already partway there they just need more durable, small sensors like a handheld light spectrometer to tell what things are made of and a handheld interferometer to detect gravity
Check out the app Phyphox, it uses all your existing sensors and probably surpasses tricorders in several ways while, of course, lacking in a few others.
I can detect gravity without a device:
Jump off a roof. If you hit the ground, you’ve detected gravity.
You could just raise your arm and let it loose…
Fast-refresh ePaper. I just want a laptop I can use outside, man!
Look up Daylight DC-1 might be what you are looking for
I remember we could use the game boy advance SP outside. Is this screen technology used for PC?
Suicide Machines on Street Corners.
I read that as Sucide Marines and was confused for a bit
They already have them that you can carry in your pocket.
Yeah but they make such a mess.
external gestation…a womb with a view
severe genetic manipulation… designer babies
digit/limb/organ regeneration
Seems entirely reasonable that a Gattaca future is achievable. Whether desirable is the other question. Somewhere CJ Cherryh is being worshipped as a prophet.
Artificial wombs are something that’s often presented as dystopian, but I would imagine would actually be a very good thing. Beyond the obvious help it would be to infertile couples that desired children, they would if commonly adopted eliminate the danger of birth and pregnancy complications, and discomfort associated with the process. Probably not everyone would want to use it, but I’d bet even having the option would mean a lot to a lot of people.
And then all of this gave birth to the terrorists known as the Naturalists™…
Artificial stem cells seem like the next thing to really revolutionize medicine.
Quantum computers for brute force hacks seems doable in 100.
Eye tracking pointer devices will likely be more convenient than mice within a dozen or two years. This will probably be widely available for people who are paralyzed first.
Diamond processors are always 10 years away, but I think we can do it in 100. This would revolutionize the amount of power we can put through a chip without worrying about cooling.
Quick charge capacitor replacements for standard rechargble batteries
Low yield fusion plants. I’d like to think of them as capable of high yield, but it’s much harder than initially thought. Some ideas are quite promising for low yield.
The eye tracking stuff exists already. There are medical device companies that build and sell these things.
I feel like the bottleneck will be with smooth continuous motions. It’s very easy to move a cursor in that way with a mouse but you can’t do that motion with your eyes unless you are looking at something else that’s moving.
Nuclear fusion seems increasingly achievable.
They are down to 2 main problems now. The main one is (the cost of) scaling up. Fusion reactors will be more effective then bigger they are. The tiny test ones are already past break even.
The other is wall material. Apparently the radiation has an annoying ability to transmute the elements making up the wall of the reactor. They are working out a material that can maintain its bulk mechanical properties, even with random elements appearing in its internal structure.
The only one I heard news about breaking even was that thing that shot a lot of lasers to a pellet. For a fraction of a second It broke even or produced slightly more than they poured in, but it was much less of what they spent.
There’s been something else new?
I saw a talk on the subject about a year back. It was discussing tokamak reactors, from an engineer working on them. The small ones can’t sustain a break even state, but they are affected by the inverse square law to a larger degree. I believe China is about to start/has started construction on a power station sized test reactor.
The pellet sort are a different type. They have different pros and cons.
I suspect we will see a human brain to digital interface. I don’t think it will be “downloading minds” or anything, but I could see someone finding a way to plug a specialized camera or mic in to have a full functioning robotic replacement part.
I’m pretty sure they already have the beginning pieces to this, but its too specialized and expensive to do anything commercial with it yet.
This is so terrifying to me. I feel like it’ll end up like the Black Mirror episode with the subscription model, getting more and more expensive with fewer features.
Common People
That episode made my wife and I really hope this tech never becomes a thing.
Cochlear implants are a form of this, and are already commercial. I remember having a conversation with a guy at a doof about 10 years ago, standing right near a loud sound system, and it took me 20 minutes to realise he had one. He was completely deaf without it on… I can only assume the tech is much better these days.
Similar things exist for vision (though maybe not yet commercial?).
bsg, sga all had the brain interface thing going on. especially the cylon part was all about that.
Ai and eeg can read brain waves generate images already kinda decent, maybe meet the robinsons memory viewer machine.
Can we get a dream recorder, please?!
I feel like wed learn everyone has cool dreams and pivot back to skill being a thing over just imaginstion and prompts lol
Computer circuits based on light instead of electricity.