Which of your favorite sci-fi tech seems achievable in a reasonable timeframe, say 100 years?
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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.
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Underwater cities
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Fast-refresh ePaper. I just want a laptop I can use outside, man!
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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
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Suicide Machines on Street Corners.
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Read the link posted. They already did it. In 2007. At a distance of 144km.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]No they didn't, they sent a conventional signal that was encrypted with an entangled particle. Nothing was sent ftl, this is like if I had two boxes that I know have the same thing in them, an encryption key, and traveled across the world, and sent you a message, you have the other box, the information in that box didn't go ftl you just opened it later.
there is no path to ftl communication here.
have a basic video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oBiS_Yb9Ac
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No they didn't, they sent a conventional signal that was encrypted with an entangled particle. Nothing was sent ftl, this is like if I had two boxes that I know have the same thing in them, an encryption key, and traveled across the world, and sent you a message, you have the other box, the information in that box didn't go ftl you just opened it later.
there is no path to ftl communication here.
have a basic video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oBiS_Yb9Ac
The FTL is the sci-fi component that is the subject of the thread, the quantum entanglement communication part is the real world piece they actually got working.
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That is indeed that bit I was saying couldn't be done. Entanglement alone can't be used to communicate; a signal has to be sent conventionally over the distance.
The FTL bit is physically impossible, so it's not really "achievable in a reasonable time-frame"
This you?
I'm familiar with quantum entanglement. It doesn't work because you have no way of affecting which state you'll measure, and thus what state the other particle will be in.
That's exactly the part they DID get working.
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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.
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Portable communicators. It would be slick to have a USB c tricorder though.
Download the Phyphox app to access your phones raw sensor data. Very much like a tricorder.
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Download the Phyphox app to access your phones raw sensor data. Very much like a tricorder.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]You've just destroyed my afternoon, thanks and congratulations
Edit: installed it. very cool. It would be crazy on my watch though.
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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.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]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?
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The FTL is the sci-fi component that is the subject of the thread, the quantum entanglement communication part is the real world piece they actually got working.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]It will never be possible to use this for ftl communications. This is like saying in 100 years we will use very long steel rods to communicate ftl by pushing on them. The problem is fundamental.
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borg nanoprobes, or replicator nanites of sg1 and sga.
Pre-progammed viruses to set in motion whatever changes you want in the body.
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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.
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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.
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Vaccines. Maybe in 100 years we'll even be able to eliminate measles...again.
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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?!
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Asteroid mining. We've had the tech to get people to the asterodi for decades, just lack the will to do it.
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Underwater cities
With climate change and coastal flooding, it's coming, just not in the form you're thinking of.
