Energy for everyone
October 25th, 2007 Johannes
The availability of free energy always has been a requirement for life. Every time evolutionary processes made new sources of energy accessible, life spread out rapidly (consider the evolution of photosynthesis). Some higher forms of life, such as mankind, even have the ability to use energy extra-somatically (outside the body). Finally, the (technical/cultural) evolution of our energy sources enabled us, to expand from a few thousands to billions of beings.
Contrary to the developments in the former 5 billion years, new methods are arising which could practically increase the amount of available energy to infinity. In other words, we are facing an era of energy at no charge! There is reason to assume this, promising candidates are in range which could achieve that: nuclear fusion, solar power (biological, semiconductors) and more exotic ones like artificial black holes (basically the matter you put in radiates competely).
In this post I won’t focus on details of technical realisation, instead I shortly want to discuss, what it would mean to have endless amounts of energy.
- Access to resources: most elements (or their chemical compounds) are abound in the oceans. With endless amounts of energy, it’s not a big deal to extract them. Certainly, that also applies to fresh water.
- Taken that as the raw input, the synthesis of any sort of material sounds likely to happen.
- Materials can be shaped and built together by fabrics using nanotechnology. Those fabrics (which might be found at our homes) could construct virtually anything like spoons, Internet devices, prostheses, buildings and … themselves!
- No need to worry about the food supply of a future civilisation: Subsurface agriculture has already been rendered possible.
Consequently, this would change anything - the radical change of the production sector would be only the beginning. Since basically every product would be free, our whole concept of value (and currency) needs to be reconsidered. Additionally, it’s probable that the service sector will be absorbed by intelligent computer networks (more about this coming soon).
Think about it - this would render us jobless (in a traditional meaning of “work”). Maybe future civilisations wouldn’t have to worry about former needs and could produce the only things left: Ideas and culture!
Posted in next 50 years | No Comments »
Touchscreens 2.0
October 20th, 2007 Johannes
The very first idea I want to present is a simple one. It’s about a new generation of touchscreens. Due to their ability to provide highly dynamic and colorful content, touchscreens have become important input devices, especially for cellular phones. On the other hand touchscreens still are pretty far away from what you’d call a generally appreciated input device, which would find usage in mainstream applications such as computers, handhelds, microwaves, cars etc. Needless to say that their costs exceed simple “push button” devices, but I believe there are more reasons - today’s touchscreens are lacking one crucial component: Feedback!
Consider the standard PC keyboard. If you press a button, you a) feel the buttons shape b) see the button being pressed down c) hear a distinctive sound. All three information pathways (tactile, visual and auditive) are perceived and converged to the feeling of typing on a real keyboard.
In fact, the tech industry is already trying to add visual feedback (Apples iPhone) and tactile feedback produced by vibrations which respond to user input (Samsung, Nokia). Clearly, this marks the beginning of a new era of touchscreens. What can we expect from future touchscreens?
Essentially you touch a 2-dimensional surface, therefore the big challenge is to model the sensation you’d have touching a 3-dimensional shape. In the scientific community similar things already have been investigated. Basically, if your fingertip “probes” an object, the perception of shape and texture can be broken down to the sensory input of vibration patterns, which are produced by stretching and compressing your skin. In consequence, artificial local stretching and compressing of the skin matching the right pattern of vibrations will cause the sensation of touching a real object (of course the representation of height might be limited to a few millimeters). My guess for the technical realisation is a thin & transparent layer made of nano- or micro-structured piezoelectric elements.
Imagine a laptop which would have a huge built-in touchscreen instead of a physical keyboard and touch-pad, which is capable of providing tactile feedback. Dynamic keyboard layouts and toolbars could be displayed, customized for each application. Since it provides feedback, you wouldn’t miss the feeling of a real keyboard - I’d even state, without regarding the keyboard from its side, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell whether you are typing on a flat surface or not.
Besides from that, if you’d open this (unfortunately still hypothetical) laptop completely, both screens could melt to one giant screen. A take-along screen as big as 20-25 inch sounds … neat!
P.S. Apple recently patented the idea I described above. I guess the product will be available in the next 2 years…
By the way, I have seen an extremely nice video by Jeff Han, introducing his new intuitive touchscreen environment. Definitely worth watching!!
Posted in next 10 years | 2 Comments »
About ScienceForecast
October 19th, 2007 Johannes
This blog is based on a simple dogma: The 21th century developments of science & technology will have an huge impact on everything, that surrounds us. Since the discovery of new key technologies in former times always caused tremendous changes in terms of daily live, social systems & governments and especially the idea of man, I highly expect this to be true also for upcoming key technologies.
My intuition is to provide some ideas of arising key technologies by extrapolating and transferring today’s scientific results. This blog serves as a platform for further discussion about consequences that might emerge.
Thanks for reading, I’m looking forward for our discussions.
Posted in general stuff | 1 Comment »
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