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I was thinking of having a thread discussion regarding all things futuristic (near and far): emerging technologies, robotics, AI, space-travel, space-industry, alternative and eco tech, etc. Don't hesitate to bring up relevant politics, ideas, ideologies, predictions, or philosophical insights!

And to get the ball rolling I wanted to bring up how Netherlands, a tiny country roughly the size of Pennsylvania is now the second largest exporter of agricultural goods. I really am fascinated by the very effective and eco-friendly technology that has emerged in Netherlands – able to grow so much food. National Geographic did a great article on how it all came to being.

No futurism thread is complete without wild and irresponsible speculation about the EmDrive!

I've been following news about this for over a year. If it turns out to be a nothingburger I think I'll cry.

I think the possibility of the EMDrive would be something we would be able to discover soon, but the energy necessary to effectively use it would be astronomical and beyond our reach. But I also kind of think the whole FTL thing in sci fi is a bit of a shortcut, because I think space-exploration would be slow at first, and it would take hundreds of years before we fully colonize the solar system we are in – and thousands more before we can effectively colonize other star systems – and honestly, I feel like that has a lot more romantic realism to it. I mean, by that point we, as a species, would have the experience and technology necessary to truly terraform planets, and hopefully, create a society that has to accept the reality that they are a multi-planet species.

But I won't lie.

It is astronomically exciting :D

Speaking of science and shit with how a while back we detected two black holes merging the results more or less shot down the theory that the universe is a simulation, the theory that the reason why gravity is so weak is because there's large extra dimensions and other theories of the sort. Simply put because shit gets weird between the two black holes it can't be simulated by even a computer with a infinite amount of processing power.

So apparently multiple mental problems have been linked to the same genes, such as schizophrenia, depression and such. This is good news because this means at some point in the future there will be a one size fit all for genetically caused mental illnesses.

Could you do the opposite? Give your kids genetic depression for some reason? Would that be legal?

Yes, but that would be extremely fucked up cause it would probably give them dozens of mental illnesses.

Oh also what was found out that by basically baking wood and compressing it at 100 degrees celsius the result is wood that is extremely strong and extremely light. The reason why this is important is that in say ten years to make a wood house you would need significantly less materials. I know I'm oversimplifying but instead of say a shipment of wood delivered to build your house you're talking more along the lines of a pickup truck bed filled amount.

OP is talking about agricultural goods from Netherlands.

Farming has been around for ages, the only future is well we will have more veggies.

The world of tomorrow in my theory will not be a drastic change, but a slowly creeping sentient takeover with pompous billionaires gradually mechanizing the earth for their benefit. Embedding nanotechnologies inside the Earth as Phase 1

Recently there was a launch of a rocket that uses kerosene and liquid oxygen and uses electricity to heat the oxygen before igniting it. The reason why this is important is that per pound this is the most per pound cost effective rocket. It can carry 500 pounds/225kg for $6 million usd. Also the shell was made of carbon composite.

This is just a opinion, but chances are in the long run satellites will continue to get smaller, cause it's more cost effective. What a lot of companies are doing is cooperative competition where people work together to create standardized satellite parts with companies they're competing against. On the one hand if you're working together with a company directly competing against you you're helping your competition, on the other hand you're helping save millions of dollars on each rocket launch.

So needing something yet bigger to fund his great adventures to Mars, Musk has decided that the next venture to conquer is the internet

Interestingly this is done under SpaceX, because SpaceX doesn't have nearly the kind of profit margins (if not outright loses) that Tesla does. Additionally Space X is a private company unlike Tesla's public traded company.

@Chewybunny
Well it makes sense. He now has the biggest fucking rocket right now so if you put a bunch of cubesats in the falcon heavy he pretty much has it in the bag.

There's this INSANE site called Future Timeline that talks all about innovation, future projects to be completed, population, very interesting shit. Highly recommend it

I am interested in teeth restoration due to an impacted wisdom tooth screwing a molar up that had to be removed. Don't know if research is going anywhere between 2018-2030 or something. Not to mention I can't imagine the price of such treatment if anything came about.

That's actually really cool. I often dread the idea of having to get my teeth removed and replaced with the screw and a fake tooth. Having something that is my own would be great. And even with the high cost, such things are inevitably going to go down.

Really cool video of Elon Musk's reaction to the success of the Falcon X

“We tried to cancel the Falcon Heavy program three times at SpaceX, because it [was] way harder than we thought….Crazy things can come true. When I see a rocket lift off, I see a thousand things that could not work, and it's amazing when they do.” -Musk

Didn't the teeth restoration articles appear even before 2010? I think I read one in 2005 or so.

Israeli biotech company successfully grows bones in lab

As medical tech is increasing at massive rates, is it possible we may see pseudo immortality in our lifetimes?

We'll all have a great day tomorrow.

So ARM has managed to make a processor that is capable of performing 3 trillion operations per second per watt. To oversimplify this basically in say two years a $100 graphics card for your computer will be able to run games at 14k and 120fps.

I've been told that the future is "data crystals", and I have yet to see it.

This is interesting: a college in Italy managed to make superatomic semiconductors.You know how basic semiconductors work right? Up until recently we've been shrinking computers circuitry. What this superatomic semiconductor is basically different chemical bonds that do the same thing as multiple logic gates but do so in one gate. To overly simplify it would allow for MUCH more variety than and, nand, or, nor, not, xor, xnor, etc. There isn't any real information on how many potential there could be, but there could be a lot.

sauce plz

https://phys.org/news/2018-02-superatomic-d-semiconductor.html

It's probably not going to be for a while until we see it in everyday computers, but it is interesting nonetheless.

Okay this is actually kind of creepy but exciting in a certain way;
Erasing memories from snails and possibly later humans

Little bit of info from above article:

Scientists Can Erase Specific Memories From a Snail’s Brain

(Long-term memories are moderated by synapses, essentially tubes that allow one neuron to pass along a signal to another. The properties of the synapses can increase or decrease in strength, and that's "responsible for the maintenance of the memory," wrote co-author Samuel Schacher, a professor of neuroscience in the Department of Psychiatry at the Columbia University Medical Center, in an email. According to him, "we were able to reverse long-term changes in synaptic strength at synapses known to contribute to different forms of memories.")

Some other links:
http://www.iflscience.com/brain/scientists-have-managed-to-erase-memories-in-a-snails-brain/

http://newsroom.cumc.columbia.edu/blog/2017/06/22/select-memories-can-erased-leaving-others-intact/

https://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/49761/title/Memories-Erased-from-Snail-Neurons/

Granted, it's snails, but I'd like to erase my teenage internet self from my mind soon as possible. [shadow the hedgehog intensifies]. Also of course because it could help people with social anxiety, depression, PTSD and the like.

So they found out which genes are responsible for how your face is structured. Out of the 15 genes 7 were for your nose.

A successful test of creating a sheep/human hybrid was successful. The sheep only has about 0.1% human dna, but in the future it may be possible to grow human organs in animals. However you would need much more human dna in animals to do so.

So pseudo-immortality when?

Probably sometime between thirty to fifty years.

They day after you and I die.

Eventually ,because there is certainly a market for it, some humans will try to turn into furries through genetic engineering and something might go wrong or have a bigger effect than anticipated… What I am saying is that we might actually see werewolves in the future. Kind of cool

This sort of testing isn't to annoy the robots, rather it's to test their ability to overcome obstacles. In the case of a natural disasters it would have to be capable of handling unforeseen changes in environment.

Yeah so Alpha Centauri is pretty much a no go for the search for life. This happened a while back, but apparently their solar system has MASSIVE solar flares that are capable of sterilizing all life. The solar flare was ten times anything we see in our solar system.

No biggie. It would be doubtful that we would reach that far reliably for at least another several hundred years. After all, we still have our entire solar system to explore still.

I wouldn't be surprised if we did find life on Europa. They're working towards simulating what it would be like internally. What they're thinking the core is like is super heavy elements surrounded by water. In active planets the core is often times filled with superheavy elements, like how our core's internal heat is half cause of a giant fucking nuclear reaction.

There was some other bad news for the search for life a while back also. Planets around red dwarfs might not be as good either. The reason being is that while yes a red dwarf has a drastically larger goldilock zone the downside is that it'd be so close that over time it's atmosphere might get stripped and the water over time would get stripped. Life on the planets would last a couple hundred million years but over time would get stripped clean of it's water and die like how Mars died cause lack of water meant the tectonic plates couldn't flow.

There is some good news though. Water worlds might be the best bet. Think planets like 455B from Subnautica. As the planet ages what the current theory is that over time continents would form as lighter elements forced to the surface.

The downside is that higher life may be incredibly rare in the universe, but the good news is that planets capable of supporting higher lifeforms probably aren't going anywhere anytime soon, cause the majority of those planets would have a ionosphere, large oceans and a atmosphere.

Even if we find a planet that is losing it's atmosphere and water at a rate that in a few million years it will be gone, to us that is many many many lifetimes. At which point the ability to just "move on" from the planet would probably be infinitely easier than the original arrival.

I know. I was just pointing it out from a looking for intelligent life viewpoint.

What I mean by what I was talking about is that the bad news is that drastically less planets than we initially thought could support higher life, the good news is that the we drastically shrunk the type of candidates we have to look for for higher life.

Good news: there probably is billions of planets with bacteria or single cell organisms.
Bad news: there probably is only hundreds of thousands of planets with multicellular organisms.
Good news: we drastically narrowed the number of planets we have to look at for intelligent life.
Bad news: the nearest planet that supports multicellular life probably is dozens of lightyears away.
Good news: if there are evil aliens out there that want to kill us chances are they're thousands of light years away from us and probably don't even know we exist yet.

For all we know we may be the first founders, the ancient race that seeded the galaxy as we often see in sci-fi tropes.

For all we know, with the sheer tiny amount of planets that can support life, nay, mutli-celled complex life, even life that is even semi intelligent is so utterly miniscule it may literally be eons before we encounter another species as intelligent as ours…by which point we may even be further along in our evolution – which by that point I think we should have total mastery over.

So experiments to shield satellites from space debris is being worked on. Basically taking the concept of how there's satellites that inflate and taking it one step further. By having multiple layers of laminates separated by gas the first layer when hit shreds the initial projectile and by the time the projectile hits the second layer it's already exerted most of it's energy on the first layer.

Simply put if this testing does work out in twenty years if north korea or such threaten to cause a chain reaction for space debris the rest of the world's reaction will be "do it you pussy bitch".

I wonder if similar technology can be used to intercept high altitude ICBMS like what Russia is doing.

Reading the NatGeo magazine on last month regarding sattelite deployment, we have 8 times more than the nearest competitor flying in space. AND the vast majority of Chinese and Russian (2nd and 3rd place in terms of space sattelite deployment), the vast majority of ours is privatized.

I wonder, how hard it would it be to intercept such a nuclear device with a suicidal satellite?

@Chewybunny
The easiest way to intercept ICBMs would be laser defense. If you have a ultra high altitude planes on the verge of space with laser defense that covers a massive area.

Here's something interesting. UC San Diego is working with a visual neural net to predict strains of yeast. However the interesting thing is that there is no black box in this system and because there's only so many different strains of yeast coupled together with how small the neural net is they can study it in detail.

The implication of this research is that it would allow us in the long run to understand how intelligence works on the basic level. To use a metaphor if this was a video game this line of research in it would lead to "The everything algorithm" and "Blurring the line between man and machine".

China tests giant air cleaner to combat smog, powered by the sun

A demostration of human ingeniuty or a demostration of China's tendency to ignore and cover up their own problems and probably bad news for the enviroment at large? You decide, at least our air cleaning technology is improving and getting more energy efficient (though still impractical the thing just turns air pollution into solid waste another type of pollution and it needs "maintenance"), so the chances of humanity living not just in space but say underground, the ocean, etc in a couple years/decades are quite high, interesting to think about the potential.

Both to be honest. However, this is yet another example that the real solution to climate change combat is better technology, and if we are serious about it, we need to foster that technology and innovation.

Well this is interesting; what is being debated on and we probably will see is cataloging numerous animal species' dna to be able to tell what is a viable organism. To phrase this another way most of the time organisms' amount number of base pairs are less than a couple million. There are some with like 100 billion, but they're few and far between.

To phrase this is better there's about 4^150,000,000,000 potential combinations of dna; however in reality only a very small number of those combinations are capable of making a living organism; you can't just slap dna together and make it work. However this goes even a step further and figuring out what makes a organism viable and capable of functioning as a species without any guidance.

What we are talking about is in say a hundred years fully mapping out the entire tree of evolution by eliminating the googol number of combinations of dna that can't make viable organism; by eliminating all the potential combinations that aren't viable you eliminated 99.99999% of potential combinations. This would go way beyond say something as simple and childish as wanting to reverse engineer dinosaurs or make genetically engineered catgirls; we're talking complete mastery over nature itself.

By eliminating 99.9999999999% of total potential dna combinations due to them not being able to make a viable organism it would reduce gene engineering to mere child's play

So they found out that modern humans interbred with Denisovans within a single generation… I'm genuinely not exaggerating. Denisovans were another branch of hominids that existed as recently as only a couple thousand years and the branch they belong to was a offshoot of Neanderthals.

Humanity summarized with a meme:

This is the biggest problem with the whole Race Realism argument. It ignores that, well, humans like to fuck.

Pretty much. What is interesting about human evolution is that it points out that it is extremely unlikely that there will ever be other species of humans or offshoots of humans. The reason being is that if humans can have children with something they will.

Tldr; 2364 AD