Month: January 2013

Combustion and the Stone Age

I can’t help but think we are stuck on stupid when it comes to some technology.  Computer CPUs double in speed every couple of years, but my SUV still has a combustion engine that was created over a hundred years ago.  Sure it is more fuel efficient, more power, and burns cleaner, but it’s essentially the same basic concept of a controlled explosion causing the locomotion of my vehicle.

So now the tough question, if not this what is the answer?  Obviously I don’t have the answer to that question but I would imagine that enhanced electricity is the next logical step but after that is anyone’s guess.  By “enhanced” electricity I think we will see some combination of elements that will cause the perpetual generation of electricity with minimal waste and byproducts.

Hydrogen has great potential, but again it’s just another take on the combustion type mechanism.  Of course this might be a mute issue several hundred years from now because I think we will a dramatic decrease in the privately owned vehicle and instead a move toward mass transit and the preferred mode of travel.

Fast forward a couple of thousand years from now and you will likely teleport or timeshift eveywhere you need to go.  If it’s the later, please come back to 2013 and confirm I was right. 🙂

 

Life by Design

I was thinking about something I had read in the past that said people with certain blood types actually react differently to certain food types based on their blood type .  For instance (making this up) a person with AB+ might do best eating carbohydrates and sugar, where another person with O+ might do best eating protein and fats.  It sounds laughable, but I clearly remember doing a quick survey of my friends and that darned book was fairly accurate.

So this got me to thinking, we know people are different in other ways too.  For instance, girls are emotionally driven, where guys tend to be visual.  Now some will argue this is environmental and I will concede that’s true to some degree, but there’s no mistaking that to a large extent we are who we are because it’s programmed in our DNA to be predisposed to like certain things in such a way and to perceive things in our own light as it were.

Herein is the heart of what I see as the next step in our life by design.  Some things can be garnered based on gender, age, race, etc and those would be easy to gather, but to get deeper they would have to look at your genetic makeup.  Even today, with our current level of technology, this concept isn’t to far fetched.

This concept comes down to precision.  Today we take SWAGs (Scientific Wild Ass Guesses) for just about everything in our world.  In the future the tolerances for everyday things will be much more exact.

So in the future you have a card you carry that has all of this accumulated information and that would represent the real you.  Imagine you walk into a pharmacy and a headache medicine is custom tailored for you right on the spot.  You go to a restaurant and the food is created so that it is perfect (for you) every time.  Shopping would mostly be done online and the few major retailers would show you things they know you will like and then custom make things so they compliment the deeper you.

 

Time After Time

While I was backing up last years photos to my network storage device it occurred to me that my iPhone has replaced the digital camera just as that replaced the Polaroids of my childhood.  What’s amazing is that my children and their children after them will enjoy an unprecedented look back at the past via pictures.  But as technology marches forward where will the next generation go with their visual recordings of their special moments?  My guess is that at some point we will all wear a device that doesn’t take snapshots but instead is a continuous video record of everything we see and do.  Then at the end of the day one could decide which portions of their day to retain for historical reference.  Imagine having a candid review of even a single important moment in your life and you can quickly see the value this would bring.  Then imagine that same system having the records from all of your loved ones who were also at that event.  You would see the world in an entirely different light.

Now most reading this will say so what, we already have video cameras, but where I think this idea differs from that dramatically is the next step.  I imagine a system that holds these life records and then can intelligently recall them with a likeness of ourselves for future generations.  So 100 years from now my great, great grandchildren would be able to query the life record of their ancestors and ask it a question.  Say this hypothetical great, great grandson asks about girls and love.  A computer generated likeness of myself could talk and interact with him and even show him some of the trials and tribulations of life.

As modern advances create new forms of artificial intelligence, it’s conceivable that my future relatives will be able to actually have a conversation with the virtual me.  The computer would put together this virtual likeness based on the life records and then decide how I might have answered any given question.  It would even be able to play back specific instances and again pull in the perspectives of others that were there.

We all hate the thought of dying, but here is a way that we could, in a manner of speaking, live on forever.