When is your Future?

What 5 things will indicate to you that it’s officially The Future? These things can already exist.

For me:
1. Solar power that actually operates at 50%+ efficiency
2. widely available HUDs
3. instant communication
4. efficient voice recognition/transcription
5. touch screens

Ok, so it was going to be 10, but I got distracted by ThinkGeek. Yay for a Future full of short attention spans. I blame the sick what has infested my body. Go away, sick. *pokes with stick*

I’ll probably actually put some thought into this and come up with a good list when my brain is functional again. Just thought I’d get the ball rolling.

16 thoughts on “When is your Future?

  1. 1. free energy generators [www.cheniere.org] in wide use
    2. VR chatrooms in wide use
    3. hologram touch ‘screen’ computer interface
    4. speak to text software is awesome and on my ipod
    5. my ipod, and everything else, is coin sized

        • Re: free energy generators

          If he says he’s serious, then I believe that he thinks he’s serious.

          I wonder, though, why he’s selling DVDs for a living instead of being the CEO of a revolutionary alternative-energy empire. If his overunity machine really works, shouldn’t the investors be beating on his door?

        • Re: free energy generators

          He answers that question on his website. But I’m sure you can guess.

          Your hint is: How can you sell something free?

        • Re: free energy generators

          Well, the energy may be free, but presumably the patented machine to extract it isn’t.

          By analogy, Mp3 music is now cheap and plentiful, but Apple still seems to have sold a few iPods.

          I can think of a corporation or three out there who could profit immensely if the scarcity of electrical energy were abolished. Why haven’t the perpetual motion people managed to win over a single one of them?

        • Re: free energy generators

          For instance, if Google had at its disposal a machine to suck energy out of free space, they could light up unmanned datacenters in the middle of the ocean.

          Google is already the leader of the pack in fits-in-a-freight-container, deploy-with-an-Apache-helicopter-and-have-it-running-in-30-minutes clustery technology. If it suddenly became easy to set up server installations that were power-independent, then the global telecom game would be turned upside down, and Google would be in an ideal position to capitalize on it.

          This is one of the most think-outside-the-boxy engineering departments in the world. They must’ve thrown a little physicist time at evaluating these claims. No?

        • Re: free energy generators

          Ah, but what about those making billions on the energy producing technologies that would immediately become obsolete and bankrupt? An amount of money greater than the worth of the Roman Empire is at stake.

          And just think what people were willing to do to control that.

        • Re: free energy generators

          I wonder if electromechanical engineers and tinkers get contract-killed in significant numbers when they try and go public with their discoveries.

          I bet somewhere out there is a blog that tracks unexplained deaths in the perpetual motion community. Newspaper clippings and so on.

        • Re: free energy generators

          I did read about a guy who made a perpetual motion machine, brought it to the Royal Academy of Scientists [or whatever] showed them it worked, and promptly got ignored and laughed at.

          As far as this blog you speak of, surely it exists. However, I’m sure it rarely comes to that.

  2. Oh, hey, I like this idea:

    1) Somatic gene therapy
    2) Cheap as free, clean as air Outkast, universally-available power.
    3) Clean air, water and food, universally, for everyone, forever. (This, I think, will take the longest =/)
    4) Government on a scale comprehensible to its citizens (this can be an expansion of direct democracy / information, or just smaller government / states. Most likely bits of both).
    5) General Artificial Intelligence.

    Do feel better soon, bl00. Hugs and puppies.

  3. 1) Energy efficient, flying cars
    2) The power of my current desktop in my wristwatch
    3) Colonies on other planets
    4) Perfected cold fusion
    5) Robot slaves rising up against their fleshy oppressors…

    It may just be the imp of the perverse, but I’m looking forward to a dystopian nightmare future.

  4. think geek is quite distracting. my friend comes over to steal the catalouge every month. yes I spent enough there once to get an actual physical monthly catalouge *ahem* I think she has psychic thinkgeek powers. She can tell THE DAY it is delivered.

Leave a Reply to copperpot Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.