To wit, coincidences are more noticeable than non-coincidences, and once you've noticed one it'll be much easier to notice others you might have missed.
I myself once spent about a week seeing Curta hand-held mechanical calculators everywhere. Books, magazines, blog posts, youtube... I wasn't complaining, of course, the Curta is an amazing piece of engineering, but still, it was a bit weird.
If we controlled the world government, then what are all these politicians who run on a platform of exposing the secret government that already controls the world going to do?
Another species is very useful for unity, not necessarily for us to band together against, but because a proper intelligent alien kind of invalidates every religion. All the conflicts from culture clashing suddenly become pointless.
Or at least racists will have something else to look down on.
Throughout history men have joined with their enemies to kill their neighbors. Cortez had an army of native Americans with him to take down the Aztecs.
When the aliens show up and demand who's responsible for why our societies are such shitshows, all we have to do is point towards the fancy neighborhoods
I'd like to support solarpunk development. I just want to live a simple life, with high tech in cooperation with the environment. We need it badly. I would fund so many community libraries. Don't misunderstand me though. I still want space travel, but I no longer trust capitalists with it.
I've been thinking along the same lines lately. A fully open source hardware and software architecture and implementation, to replace the closed "old world".
Or it'll be a gold rush situation where that guy will break even, but the people selling him rocket fuel will make a modest fortune. It's all dependent on how expensive the shipping method invented is.
Asteroid mining is incompatible with current capitalism. Say you harvest an asteroid with 100,000 of platinum in it. You in theory now have trollions of dollars in platinum for the $40 billion you spent harvesting the asteroid, only you have now quadrupled the amount of platinum in the economy, crayering the price and totally ruining your company. It's obviously a net good for humanity as a scarce resource is now abundant, but it is bad for capitalism because the ones who finaced the work are the biggest loser.
I did some googling and math. Global platinum market is 8 million oz a year. Current spot price is ~$900. That's $7T per year. They would have a monopoly and be able to shut down all mines by undercutting the price selling at say $800/oz. If it cost $40 Billion to mine the asteroid, that means it would take 7 years to pay back the cost.
7 year payback is short for businesses. Commercial Solar is installed despite having a 10 year payback.
Oil jas constant demand and the Saudis have so much of it that it costs them very little to drill for it and store it. And digging a new well doesn't immediately flood the market with 4x the annual production of oil.
I'm not arguing against asteroid mining. I am saying that it is fundamentally impossible under our current capitalist system. That's why there has been zero advances in the concept in iver a decade.
They don't have to sell all the platinum immediately. Just like DeBeers has mountains of diamonds they keep locked up in warehouses to keep the price controlled.
People make this sound way harder to achieve than it actually is. There's even people who are poly for free. I don't know how many do group sex but it's not none, and theoretically you could be one of them.
Is that where it's from? I knew it was a meme, but I just thought I'd bring up that it's a weird one, given it's in the responses to every question like this.
An end to the problem of aging, and death.
Whether that means turning into cyborgs, I donβt care. I just want to choose when I die. Not having dying slowly happen to me like a terminal illness. Plus life is way too short. If I get tired of immortality let me off myself. But let me at least get tired of it first.
Have you ever heard of de'beers diamond hoarding story. Thats like what i expect would happen to humanity if we gained the ability to live forever, 'manufactured scarcity'.
A tumultuous time of oligarchic rule with infighting to control the life extending technology. Eventually ending in a winner take all dictatorship. The masses would never see their lives extended (greener pastures visions may be made in the beginning). In fact common peoples lifespans would likely shorten as the controlling elite no longer required the same sort of widespread healthcare present even at todays standards, (depending upon where you live).
The elite would form a supplicant circle around the eventual dictator who maintains control, drip feeding the life extending technology to those who serve their dictatorship best.
Within a couple generations they won't be a dictator but our Monarch, and the common people will obey, and descend to a miserable condition.
I may have let my imagination loose today a bit...
Honestly I'd be horrified knowing that without aging, a traumatic, fatal, accident becomes more and more likely as time passes to the point of being inevitable. Always on edge for that moment when it all suddenly comes to an end.
That sounds like the gambler's fallacy to me. Time alone wount make an accident more likely, it just means potentially mpre opportunities wheee an accident could occur. Sitting on your sofa today or 10,000 years from now makes no difference if the environment is the same. If you've played the lottery 10 times before you likely won't win if you play again, if you play 100,000 times you still won't win.
You shouldn't be any more anxious about an unexpected accident than you are right now. Just without the worrying about factoring in aging.
Yeah. But on the other hand, isn't civics sort of a technology too? Policies were invented, no?
I guess you could say the UBI has already been invented, but I think practical implementation is important too. Same as if I'd said we should do fusion power or something.
Ive been thinking for years that if we could put the (absolutely enormous) privacy concerns aside think of the environmental benefit of every major city in the world having an "AI" controlling the traffic lights and variable speed limits. Using numberplate recognition cameras and gps on every vehicle to optimise flow, reduce bottlenecks and minimise time spent in traffic.
That won't work because you're approaching the problem from the wrong angle; you're trying to "fix" traffic by encouraging more traffic. If you want to improve car traffic the only possible solution is to make other forms of transport more appealing. It doesn't really matter which form of transport you focus on, it could be trains, busses, bikes, walkability, etc; just as long as you ensure it's as or more efficient than a car for the majority of journeys.
The only way to fix traffic is for there to be less traffic.
Well you arent wrong but its not like its a "pick one" situation. With the unbiased data from the AI you could optimise all forms of transport. If you can see that theres clearly a lot of people driving from point A to point B you can examine the why and implement better solutions.
Society wastes a great deal of time looking for the perfect solution while some good ones sit right under our nose. If the AI solution has a city of 1 million drivers saving 5 minutes each way on an average commute of an hour. Thats the equivalent of 166k cars not driving that day and everyone saves 10 minutes.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make and the metrics you're using don't really make sense. If one million people are driving with an average commute of 1 hour (personally I find it insane that that's considered "normal" in some places, it should be an upper bound) and switch to a train which saves only 5 minutes each way they'd still save that same 10 minutes. Depending on what you mean by your "cars not driving" metric, that's anywhere between 1 million cars (no more cars driving) and 255k cars (carbon emissions of 1m electric car commuters vs 1m national rail commuters, using this data).
That's not even accounting for the induced demand previously mentioned, making driving more appealing only creates more drivers which makes driving worse.
And all of that is still only considering the traffic itself and not the effect of the infrastructure. Take a satellite shot of any random North American city and chances are a significant portion of it is just places to park a car. It's a bit less common to see a city center dedicate half of its land to bike, bus, or train parking; that land is better used for people or business instead.
If you take 1 million cars with an average useage time of 1 hour a day and reduce that by 10 minutes thats roughly the same as taking 1 in 6 cars off the road from an emisions standpoint.
Make it 500,000 cars and reduce it by only 5 minutes its roughly the same as 41,000 cars worth of emissions that werent pumped out of exhaust pipes.
No it doesnt solve everything. Yes a well designed public transport system would be a much bigger environmental benefit. But its something that could be done with current tech and without massive infrastructure overhauls with a real tangible benefit for the environment and society.
The numbers do matter because the numbers are literally your entire argument. You're arguing building for cars is more effective, you cannot make arguments about effectiveness without numbers. Alternative transport methods can be done with current tech since alternative transport methods literally existed before cars. There are plenty of examples of places that aren't car-centric, and most major car-centric cities weren't originally built around cars. I honestly have no idea how you could have thought that's a remotely reasonable argument? It's utter nonsense.
Even if your massive infrastructure overhaul argument was valid^1^, we're literally talking about a hypothetical scenario where you can pump absurd amounts of money into a project.
Well yes, but a) the immune system gobbles up bad cells, but becomes less efficient as it ages b) point mutations accumulate with age => increases the risk of cells going haywire.
I'll add mine here then. Cat Girl genetic engineering. It helps no one but the amount of non destructive upheavel from it be easy available would be entertaining.
Imagine if we dumped our trash into one end of a big fuckoff machine and out the other end it came out in microscopic pieces into hoppers for reuse or correct disposal.
Throw in an old appliance and out the other end comes the aluminium from the body, the steel, the copper from the wiring, the silica... you get the idea.
Dont tell me how my hypothetical science fiction invention works, you dont understand the hypothetical sciemce fiction research we would be hypothetically doing.
The fiction part would kind of keep me from doing that. And I fully believe that everything that actually is possible is already being worked on as quickly as possible.
So, maybe just pay for a whole lot of renewable energy plants all around the globe. Buy up all fossil fuel plants, demolish them and put in renewables instead.
Or fund a fully open smartphone with modular components like a PC with good specs and an optional keyboard.
I fully believe that everything that actually is possible is already being worked on as quickly as possible.
Thatβs either very optimistic about our level of knowledge about the universe, or a purely semantic thing where you count the precursor technology of another technology that would eventually be the major breakthrough as βalready being worked onββ¦
For the phone, I'd like to point you to Fairphone. I'm not sure specs are the best, and I don't know about keyboard modules but other than that, it's pretty much there.
I see this very much as another Pandora's box situation for humanity. Once it's open, both good and bad things can come of it.
The bad being, brain hacking, brain ransome, and perhaps a few other things. You mention a "nondestructive brain machine," but I can't comprehend how anyone will be able to make an implant that could be engineered not to be destructible and still have uber computing power in such a small form. But who knows what advancements are in store this century?
The good, as you mentioned would be, enabling the disabled in many ways never fully realized before. Both personal and professional productivity across the board, in theory, would greatly be improved.
Way "non destructive" was my hand waving risks some tbh. What I mean is safe implants either though regenerative technology to overcome damages, precision so small no meaningful damage was done, or non invasive. I also consider reparability and upgradability/downgradabilty import.
Those machines that can make food instantly for sure. Put a few of those bad boys in the right place and we've solved world hunger. Also, healthy tasty food for those of us who can't cook and can't afford to eat at restaurants.
Granted, people in the restaurant would largely lose their job, but we can retrain them for something else like we did with stagecoach drivers, telephone operators and honest politicians before them π€·
May be poulsen treatment or immortality cruciform from Hyperion.
Not sure if immortality is such a good idea though. Throughout history horrible dictatorships tend to end after the death of the despots. Imagine if these horrible people are immortal...
The terror usually doesn't end when the dictator dies today he just gets replaced by the next in line, but even, having the entire human race go old and suffer until death to alleviate the dictator problem is maybe not the best way to do it?
that's a no on the cruciform for me, dawg. Yeesh. I'll take everything else from there though, Poulsen, hawking drive, farcasters (maybe without the yoke of the AI techno core though), etc.
I don't know how plausible this is, but a way for trans men and trans women to exchange sexual traits. There might be an answer elsewhere in that there are animals that can change sex in certain conditions so there is some biological evidence of possibility in a singular case. However it seems anti-poetic that we have genetic females who want to be genetic males and genetic males who want to be genetic females and the answer that we currently have as society is for them to go fuck themselves.
Space based mirrors for asteroid mining. Bounce a sh*tton of light from the sun around and just melt asteroids. Love that in the Troy Rising series.
Lots of problems getting there irl (need a better way to get out of the gravity well, and light speed lag for command and control would be a real issue) but the idea is just too fun.
That sounds like a great way to accidentally muzzle sweep a thousand international satellites with a billion-kWh laser beam. Not saying it's entirely a bad idea, but having invisible unshielded beams of stupendous energy bouncing all over the solar system sounds like a recipe for a couple accidental meltings. I could just see someone making an adjustment to the next mining target without informing China and whoops, that secret manned satellite you sent up a couple months ago is now slag.
Depends how it's focused. It wouldn't be a straight coherent beam, because that would actually break thermodynamics if you could produce it from sunlight.
One way to look at it is loss of information. If you point a (brightness-tolerant) telescope at a lasar beam, you can't see much. Pretty much every beam is the same. If you point it at the sun there's all kinds of interesting features. Another way is to consider that light is a gas made of photons, and you're essentially talking about making every particle spontaneously align, which in a heat engine would obviously be ridiculous. All of these are entropy-negative processes, and a passive mirror or lens is passive and can only do reversible operations.
Another fun fact that comes out of this is that a magnifying glass can never make a spot hotter than the sun. Here's an XKCD what-if that goes into it - and might honestly be where I learned this first.
Do I have to choose one? The world food program is never overfunded, and that would buy a stupid amount of lobbying for whatever overlooked domestic issue, or even just research grants for neglected but foundational things. Boring/ugly animals could also use conservation.
Maybe we understood the question differently: are you saying that if you could choose between researching Star Trek's food replicator and feeding people for a day, you'd choose fish?
Assuming 100% success, yeah, replicators would be a great choice. Or maybe that skin cream that fixes everything including intangible life problems from that one short. Assuming actual science stuff, benevolent AI maybe, so we don't have to worry about the other kind, and so it can hopefully research everything else.
I suppose lemons could be more combustible. Lemon-based biofuel. To my regret, this is not even the worst startup idea I've heard in the last 3 months.
When life gives you lemons, power a city with them. Marketing practically writes itself, at least.
It's not really science fiction since there are scientists working on it right now, because capitalism is the brake of development. I would invest on photonic computer research, that would help advancement of society in all aspect.
I read an ieee paper a few years ago that went into why photonic computing failed and why it won't ever succeed.
The problem is that photons are fat compared to electrons so circuits couldn't be made as small as they are already today. When cmos was 500 nm and researchers weren't sure if things could be made smaller, photonics made sense. But now they're at 3nm process (yes it is a marketing label, but pitch is 24 nm ) . Visible light has a wavelength of 400nm. The wave function of a photon would smear across circuits that small.
Not so much technology, but I'd fund the Howard Society for real. For those unfamiliar, it's a program to identify people who are genetically predisposed to natural long life and pay them to have kids with each other; it's a core plot point in a bunch of Heinlein novels.
I would stay in relatively achievable things like a sugar fuel cell or microbial food production. Things we don't quite have yet but not do to the knowledge not being there.
Perhaps the main use for technology is increasing the amount of inequality society can tolerate without collapse. I can't fix inequality -- that just seems to be what the humans want.
However by investing in surveillance technology, computer vision, and AI I could perhaps help our society to bear unbounded amounts of inequality indefinitely, without collapse. Social collapse is a less-than-zero-sum game, whereas an unequal society is still generally more-than-zero-sum. So I posit that the latter is objectively better.
Especially if you plan to survive long enough to get off this stinking rock -- you're going to need to concentrate resources, because the public sector only seems to be able to succeed at space travel under a very specific set of hard-to-replicate circumstances. Whereas greed, inflated egos, and concentrated power are easy to replicate.
Perhaps the main use for technology is increasing the amount of inequality society can tolerate without collapse. I canβt fix inequality β that just seems to be what the humans want.
However by investing in surveillance technology, computer vision, and AI I could perhaps help our society to bear unbounded amounts of inequality indefinitely, without collapse. Social collapse is a less-than-zero-sum game, whereas an unequal society is still generally more-than-zero-sum. So I posit that the latter is objectively better.
... Are you suggesting that we increase inequality to make the world better? Like we need an overlord, be it robot or human, and the rest of the population needs to be placated, worked to the bone, and easily replaced?
I gotta assume I am just vastly misunderstanding something in this argument, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what it is. Is it just sarcastic?
I think the optimal outcome is that technology develops to permit our society to support increasing amounts of inequality. The increasing inequality will happen anyway, we'll just be able to bear it, or not. I'm won't suggest it's a good outcome, just the optimal one.
That has a real chance of existing? Something with clean power.
That I really want? Replicators. Man think about a life not having to cook or clean dishes.
So many stupid problems could be resolved with miniaturized fusion cells
Drug addicted, Mafia made, trash fed makers from Transmetropolitan, specifically.
Is transmet trending somewhere? I haven't seen it quoted or memed in years but now twice in two days.
Not that I'm aware. Probably Baader-Meinhof.
To wit, coincidences are more noticeable than non-coincidences, and once you've noticed one it'll be much easier to notice others you might have missed.
I myself once spent about a week seeing Curta hand-held mechanical calculators everywhere. Books, magazines, blog posts, youtube... I wasn't complaining, of course, the Curta is an amazing piece of engineering, but still, it was a bit weird.
Guessing not the replicators from sg1.
Cooking is super fun tho
Earth unity. Whatever they did to make humans stop attacking each other was crazy.
We probably need another species to compete against to unite us. I'd put Billions into nasa to find aliens so we can fight them.
Nah, the US would use it as an excuse to demand a world government under their control.
If we controlled the world government, then what are all these politicians who run on a platform of exposing the secret government that already controls the world going to do?
I'm only downvoting you because that's basically what OP said, not be cause you're wrong.
Another species is very useful for unity, not necessarily for us to band together against, but because a proper intelligent alien kind of invalidates every religion. All the conflicts from culture clashing suddenly become pointless.
Or at least racists will have something else to look down on.
Throughout history men have joined with their enemies to kill their neighbors. Cortez had an army of native Americans with him to take down the Aztecs.
That Venutian amoeba will have to take one for the team. OUR team.
When the aliens show up and demand who's responsible for why our societies are such shitshows, all we have to do is point towards the fancy neighborhoods
Dump all the billions into AI controlled nuclear weapons
Now Mr Ozymandius with this one cool trick you don't even need to find the aliens.
I'd like to support solarpunk development. I just want to live a simple life, with high tech in cooperation with the environment. We need it badly. I would fund so many community libraries. Don't misunderstand me though. I still want space travel, but I no longer trust capitalists with it.
A fully open source tech manufacturing company such as chips, gpu, ram, motherboard, connectors, ssd .etc you get the idea.
I've been thinking along the same lines lately. A fully open source hardware and software architecture and implementation, to replace the closed "old world".
Hell yeah but it is all a pipe dream anyway cause no corpo or billionaire is gonna do it.
I imagine it would probably take someone obscenely rich choosing not to be rich anymore in order to make it happen. Which seems unlikely.
Unlikely is putting it mildly
Asteroid mining. This may still be too far off and too expensive. But the first person to get this working successfully will be a trillionare.
This plus fusion are the two things most needed to transition humanity to a space based civilization.
Or it'll be a gold rush situation where that guy will break even, but the people selling him rocket fuel will make a modest fortune. It's all dependent on how expensive the shipping method invented is.
And that is something to inspire to? Look at the world right now, with billions of people having almost no money at all.
This seems like it would never be lucrative in any way shape or form.
Asteroid mining is incompatible with current capitalism. Say you harvest an asteroid with 100,000 of platinum in it. You in theory now have trollions of dollars in platinum for the $40 billion you spent harvesting the asteroid, only you have now quadrupled the amount of platinum in the economy, crayering the price and totally ruining your company. It's obviously a net good for humanity as a scarce resource is now abundant, but it is bad for capitalism because the ones who finaced the work are the biggest loser.
No you've got it backward. The mining is a cover. You look for celestial bodies that require only a small delta-v to redirect to a collision event.
It's a proper hostage situation, once you've got the infrastructure to replicate it more cheaply than people can defend against it.
This would be a really cool idea for a novel or mini-series IMO.
Oh yeah. I'd consult on that for sure. Tricking Silicon Valley to invest in something that then holds Earth hostage instead. Fun plot.
...although I bet they'd still invest if you just told them. As long as the financials work.
I did some googling and math. Global platinum market is 8 million oz a year. Current spot price is ~$900. That's $7T per year. They would have a monopoly and be able to shut down all mines by undercutting the price selling at say $800/oz. If it cost $40 Billion to mine the asteroid, that means it would take 7 years to pay back the cost.
7 year payback is short for businesses. Commercial Solar is installed despite having a 10 year payback.
I think if mining economy worked like that, Saudi Arabia would have gone bankrupt by cratering the price of oil.
Oil jas constant demand and the Saudis have so much of it that it costs them very little to drill for it and store it. And digging a new well doesn't immediately flood the market with 4x the annual production of oil.
I'm not arguing against asteroid mining. I am saying that it is fundamentally impossible under our current capitalist system. That's why there has been zero advances in the concept in iver a decade.
They don't have to sell all the platinum immediately. Just like DeBeers has mountains of diamonds they keep locked up in warehouses to keep the price controlled.
Two chicks at the same time.
I know that not most woman arenβt in to a men just for his money, but the kinda chicks who will double up on a guy like me are!
Chicks dig guys with money!
Well yeah... but we call them gold diggers, not chicks.
Good point. I'm going with "giant robot". Chicks dig giant robots.
Great! You still have billions of dollars left.
People make this sound way harder to achieve than it actually is. There's even people who are poly for free. I don't know how many do group sex but it's not none, and theoretically you could be one of them.
Go watch Office Space, dude.
Is that where it's from? I knew it was a meme, but I just thought I'd bring up that it's a weird one, given it's in the responses to every question like this.
Back in its time it was an insanely popular movie and most everyone knew a few quotes from it, at least. That was one of the most remembered ones.
https://youtu.be/9jq6e8s1sik?si=b7OWeMeZs5wbdvER
Somebody tell us the dude's cousin's story. Usually you need a certain level of privilege to drop out.
An end to the problem of aging, and death. Whether that means turning into cyborgs, I donβt care. I just want to choose when I die. Not having dying slowly happen to me like a terminal illness. Plus life is way too short. If I get tired of immortality let me off myself. But let me at least get tired of it first.
Have you ever heard of de'beers diamond hoarding story. Thats like what i expect would happen to humanity if we gained the ability to live forever, 'manufactured scarcity'.
A tumultuous time of oligarchic rule with infighting to control the life extending technology. Eventually ending in a winner take all dictatorship. The masses would never see their lives extended (greener pastures visions may be made in the beginning). In fact common peoples lifespans would likely shorten as the controlling elite no longer required the same sort of widespread healthcare present even at todays standards, (depending upon where you live).
The elite would form a supplicant circle around the eventual dictator who maintains control, drip feeding the life extending technology to those who serve their dictatorship best.
Within a couple generations they won't be a dictator but our Monarch, and the common people will obey, and descend to a miserable condition.
I may have let my imagination loose today a bit...
Similar to the book/show altered carbon except in that the poor people have a knockoff way to extend life
Oh cool, an Acme version! I didn't imagine that!
Honestly I'd be horrified knowing that without aging, a traumatic, fatal, accident becomes more and more likely as time passes to the point of being inevitable. Always on edge for that moment when it all suddenly comes to an end.
That sounds like the gambler's fallacy to me. Time alone wount make an accident more likely, it just means potentially mpre opportunities wheee an accident could occur. Sitting on your sofa today or 10,000 years from now makes no difference if the environment is the same. If you've played the lottery 10 times before you likely won't win if you play again, if you play 100,000 times you still won't win.
You shouldn't be any more anxious about an unexpected accident than you are right now. Just without the worrying about factoring in aging.
Bacta Tanks. Maybe a few days in one would fix my back.
Nano-tech medicine, for sure. Injectable swarms of individually dumb, tiny robots which are controlled by an external AI doctor.
I'd invest my billions with this guy
Naa I want a Sarcophagus from Stargate.
Although only use it when you need it.
How about a UBI? Do social policies count as technologies? They do in 4X games, so I'm going with it.
I would categorize UBI as a policy/law, more than a tech thing.
Yeah. But on the other hand, isn't civics sort of a technology too? Policies were invented, no?
I guess you could say the UBI has already been invented, but I think practical implementation is important too. Same as if I'd said we should do fusion power or something.
Doors that go "swish" when they open.
Make them open and close in a circular pattern like a camera aperture and I'm in
I would fund a truly fair AI and a very gentle, but firm, self replicating robot army to enforce it's benevolent will on everyone.
So basically SkyNet, after I make a pointer arithmetic mistake.
Ive been thinking for years that if we could put the (absolutely enormous) privacy concerns aside think of the environmental benefit of every major city in the world having an "AI" controlling the traffic lights and variable speed limits. Using numberplate recognition cameras and gps on every vehicle to optimise flow, reduce bottlenecks and minimise time spent in traffic.
That won't work because you're approaching the problem from the wrong angle; you're trying to "fix" traffic by encouraging more traffic. If you want to improve car traffic the only possible solution is to make other forms of transport more appealing. It doesn't really matter which form of transport you focus on, it could be trains, busses, bikes, walkability, etc; just as long as you ensure it's as or more efficient than a car for the majority of journeys.
The only way to fix traffic is for there to be less traffic.
Well you arent wrong but its not like its a "pick one" situation. With the unbiased data from the AI you could optimise all forms of transport. If you can see that theres clearly a lot of people driving from point A to point B you can examine the why and implement better solutions.
Society wastes a great deal of time looking for the perfect solution while some good ones sit right under our nose. If the AI solution has a city of 1 million drivers saving 5 minutes each way on an average commute of an hour. Thats the equivalent of 166k cars not driving that day and everyone saves 10 minutes.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make and the metrics you're using don't really make sense. If one million people are driving with an average commute of 1 hour (personally I find it insane that that's considered "normal" in some places, it should be an upper bound) and switch to a train which saves only 5 minutes each way they'd still save that same 10 minutes. Depending on what you mean by your "cars not driving" metric, that's anywhere between 1 million cars (no more cars driving) and 255k cars (carbon emissions of 1m electric car commuters vs 1m national rail commuters, using this data).
That's not even accounting for the induced demand previously mentioned, making driving more appealing only creates more drivers which makes driving worse.
And all of that is still only considering the traffic itself and not the effect of the infrastructure. Take a satellite shot of any random North American city and chances are a significant portion of it is just places to park a car. It's a bit less common to see a city center dedicate half of its land to bike, bus, or train parking; that land is better used for people or business instead.
The specific numbers dont matter.
If you take 1 million cars with an average useage time of 1 hour a day and reduce that by 10 minutes thats roughly the same as taking 1 in 6 cars off the road from an emisions standpoint.
Make it 500,000 cars and reduce it by only 5 minutes its roughly the same as 41,000 cars worth of emissions that werent pumped out of exhaust pipes.
No it doesnt solve everything. Yes a well designed public transport system would be a much bigger environmental benefit. But its something that could be done with current tech and without massive infrastructure overhauls with a real tangible benefit for the environment and society.
The numbers do matter because the numbers are literally your entire argument. You're arguing building for cars is more effective, you cannot make arguments about effectiveness without numbers. Alternative transport methods can be done with current tech since alternative transport methods literally existed before cars. There are plenty of examples of places that aren't car-centric, and most major car-centric cities weren't originally built around cars. I honestly have no idea how you could have thought that's a remotely reasonable argument? It's utter nonsense.
Even if your massive infrastructure overhaul argument was valid^1^, we're literally talking about a hypothetical scenario where you can pump absurd amounts of money into a project.
^1.^ ^It's^ ^not,^ ^just^ ^build^ ^other^ ^infrastructure^ ^instead^ ^of^ ^more^ ^roads.^ ^From^ ^a^ ^strictly^ ^capitalist^ ^perspective^ ^it^ ^pays^ ^for^ ^itself^ ^when^ ^more^ ^space^ ^can^ ^be^ ^used^ ^for^ ^taxable^ ^business^ ^instead^ ^of^ ^the^ ^dead^ ^weight^ ^of^ ^parking,^ ^and^ ^those^ ^businesses^ ^are^ ^more^ ^accessible^ ^to^ ^foot^ ^traffic^ ^making^ ^them^ ^more^ ^profitable^ ^and^ ^therefore^ ^generating^ ^more^ ^taxes.^ ^Not^ ^to^ ^mention^ ^the^ ^maintenance^ ^costs.^
Stupid integer overflow!
Curing aging.
That would leave the time to see all the other inventions to come. It would also cure age related diseases like Alzheimer's and Cancer.
Is Cancer age related? I thought it could happen to anyone. But much more likely to happen when your older.
Well yes, but a) the immune system gobbles up bad cells, but becomes less efficient as it ages b) point mutations accumulate with age => increases the risk of cells going haywire.
Regrowing teeth
Current against foetal alkohol syndrome
You might want to pull out your wallet...
Physically impossible as per our current understanding of physics, mathematics, and technology.
Maybe not, if we where to find a cheat way with wormholes.
Every single suggestion so far has been positive, life-affirming, and productive, so I'm going to be Gru here for a change:
Bolos. AI tanks with no crew and heavily (Greek) Spartan-centric model training.
I'll add mine here then. Cat Girl genetic engineering. It helps no one but the amount of non destructive upheavel from it be easy available would be entertaining.
We should start a company.
Don't worry, I'm here to help :)
Nanotech robots for garbage recycling.
Imagine if we dumped our trash into one end of a big fuckoff machine and out the other end it came out in microscopic pieces into hoppers for reuse or correct disposal.
Throw in an old appliance and out the other end comes the aluminium from the body, the steel, the copper from the wiring, the silica... you get the idea.
But they'd just realize we are all garbage and then gray goo the entire earth
Nah thats the dystopian version, op specified "Exotic" thats the one that doesnt go wrong and kill us all.
"Exotic" isn't synonymous with "safe"
Dont tell me how my hypothetical science fiction invention works, you dont understand the hypothetical sciemce fiction research we would be hypothetically doing.
hypothetically cool, and very hypothetically legal
The fiction part would kind of keep me from doing that. And I fully believe that everything that actually is possible is already being worked on as quickly as possible.
So, maybe just pay for a whole lot of renewable energy plants all around the globe. Buy up all fossil fuel plants, demolish them and put in renewables instead.
Or fund a fully open smartphone with modular components like a PC with good specs and an optional keyboard.
Oh, I know. I'd start up a Dyson swarm to beam sunlight directly to my power plants. That should be possible.
Space based receivers right? Because otherwise that can go badly pretty quickly
Well, for space based receivers we'd have to figure out wireless power transfer.
Now I'm reminded of the microwave plants in Sim City 2000. And now I want to play Sim City 2000.
Thatβs either very optimistic about our level of knowledge about the universe, or a purely semantic thing where you count the precursor technology of another technology that would eventually be the major breakthrough as βalready being worked onββ¦
For the phone, I'd like to point you to Fairphone. I'm not sure specs are the best, and I don't know about keyboard modules but other than that, it's pretty much there.
Consciousness storage and transfer
Open source non destructive Brain machine interfaces
I want to interact with machines at the speed of thought so bad. Not to mention what it could mean for people when they are disabled.
I see this very much as another Pandora's box situation for humanity. Once it's open, both good and bad things can come of it.
The bad being, brain hacking, brain ransome, and perhaps a few other things. You mention a "nondestructive brain machine," but I can't comprehend how anyone will be able to make an implant that could be engineered not to be destructible and still have uber computing power in such a small form. But who knows what advancements are in store this century?
The good, as you mentioned would be, enabling the disabled in many ways never fully realized before. Both personal and professional productivity across the board, in theory, would greatly be improved.
If the interface is one way "reading brainwaves" not writing it should be pretty safe from hacking.
You bring up a good point.
Way "non destructive" was my hand waving risks some tbh. What I mean is safe implants either though regenerative technology to overcome damages, precision so small no meaningful damage was done, or non invasive. I also consider reparability and upgradability/downgradabilty import.
Man I always watned that, but it woudl have to be an open-source program, becuase I will not pay by having adds in my own mind
Those machines that can make food instantly for sure. Put a few of those bad boys in the right place and we've solved world hunger. Also, healthy tasty food for those of us who can't cook and can't afford to eat at restaurants.
Granted, people in the restaurant would largely lose their job, but we can retrain them for something else like we did with stagecoach drivers, telephone operators and honest politicians before them π€·
FISH!
I'd say budget 3D printed meals are around the corner.
Proper gourmet replicated meals, 60yrs.
Replicators! Yes!!
Some restaurants probably will still exist as a premium option. And chefs can create recipes and sell them online.
They'll probably add DRM to it. Crap! π¬
Atomically Precise Manufacturing!
Might actually happen in the upcoming decades.
Farmers would also loose their jobs.
I hate it when my job gets loose.
Opps
Van Neumann probes
How far off do you think we are from this becoming a reality?
One AGI breakthrough - so couple of years to never.
Imagine we send an AGI in a probe that can operate in 100-400K without oxygen or water or food or gravity, and not some brain in a flesh.
Antigravity, Durasteel, shields, cold fusion, nanotech, time travel, warp, dimension sliding/hopping, mind mapping, cryo sleep, teleportation, Positronic brain, ...
This basically covers it, I'll add replicators and holodecks
Very important...
Star Trek or Stargate replicators...
Indeed!
I'll leave it to the genie to decide
Yes, how could I miss those!!
May be poulsen treatment or immortality cruciform from Hyperion. Not sure if immortality is such a good idea though. Throughout history horrible dictatorships tend to end after the death of the despots. Imagine if these horrible people are immortal...
The terror usually doesn't end when the dictator dies today he just gets replaced by the next in line, but even, having the entire human race go old and suffer until death to alleviate the dictator problem is maybe not the best way to do it?
that's a no on the cruciform for me, dawg. Yeesh. I'll take everything else from there though, Poulsen, hawking drive, farcasters (maybe without the yoke of the AI techno core though), etc.
I also kinda want fatlines for no lag online games, haha. Though that'd be stupid expensive.
I don't know how plausible this is, but a way for trans men and trans women to exchange sexual traits. There might be an answer elsewhere in that there are animals that can change sex in certain conditions so there is some biological evidence of possibility in a singular case. However it seems anti-poetic that we have genetic females who want to be genetic males and genetic males who want to be genetic females and the answer that we currently have as society is for them to go fuck themselves.
I guess for more realistic, then deep dive VR.
Space based mirrors for asteroid mining. Bounce a sh*tton of light from the sun around and just melt asteroids. Love that in the Troy Rising series.
Lots of problems getting there irl (need a better way to get out of the gravity well, and light speed lag for command and control would be a real issue) but the idea is just too fun.
That sounds like a great way to accidentally muzzle sweep a thousand international satellites with a billion-kWh laser beam. Not saying it's entirely a bad idea, but having invisible unshielded beams of stupendous energy bouncing all over the solar system sounds like a recipe for a couple accidental meltings. I could just see someone making an adjustment to the next mining target without informing China and whoops, that secret manned satellite you sent up a couple months ago is now slag.
Depends how it's focused. It wouldn't be a straight coherent beam, because that would actually break thermodynamics if you could produce it from sunlight.
Ooh, this is new info. How so?
One way to look at it is loss of information. If you point a (brightness-tolerant) telescope at a lasar beam, you can't see much. Pretty much every beam is the same. If you point it at the sun there's all kinds of interesting features. Another way is to consider that light is a gas made of photons, and you're essentially talking about making every particle spontaneously align, which in a heat engine would obviously be ridiculous. All of these are entropy-negative processes, and a passive mirror or lens is passive and can only do reversible operations.
Another fun fact that comes out of this is that a magnifying glass can never make a spot hotter than the sun. Here's an XKCD what-if that goes into it - and might honestly be where I learned this first.
Yeah they deal with that in the book series. Lots of AI who do space traffic routing space ships around the beams so as not to get fried.
It's also used as a weapon in the books to defend the solar system. Fune books. I read em once a year or so.
room temp superconductors.
Do I have to choose one? The world food program is never overfunded, and that would buy a stupid amount of lobbying for whatever overlooked domestic issue, or even just research grants for neglected but foundational things. Boring/ugly animals could also use conservation.
Maybe we understood the question differently: are you saying that if you could choose between researching Star Trek's food replicator and feeding people for a day, you'd choose fish?
No. And cool wording by the way.
Assuming 100% success, yeah, replicators would be a great choice. Or maybe that skin cream that fixes everything including intangible life problems from that one short. Assuming actual science stuff, benevolent AI maybe, so we don't have to worry about the other kind, and so it can hopefully research everything else.
Fusion, nuclear propulsion, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, biomining, biological fuel cells
Also clean energy but personally virtual reality 100%. Give me that SAO experience, damn it. Just without y'know the bad stuff
Edit: mandatory Link
Iβm convinced that, despite his denial, Isaac Asimovβs psychohistory was a Red Scare-dodging caricature of historical materialism / scientific socialism. Iβd put my money there.
Combustible lemons. But failing that, a portal gun.
Lemons are already combustible?
It was a Portal 2 reference
Ah -- missed it. Although...
I suppose lemons could be more combustible. Lemon-based biofuel. To my regret, this is not even the worst startup idea I've heard in the last 3 months.
When life gives you lemons, power a city with them. Marketing practically writes itself, at least.
Hoverboards obviously.
Catgirls
and space adapted humans
Propulsion system for space adaptation? So high pressure farts?
If humans would still need to operate in atmosephere so: propellers with emergency high preassure farts
Bum boosters!
Giving it all away to mutual aid groups to have them figure out local issues.
Neurotransmitters into apes
Arcologies or greenhouse super domes for food production of any kind wherever it's desired
Or carbon nanotube mass production so we can build mile-high connected super structures
It's not really science fiction since there are scientists working on it right now, because capitalism is the brake of development. I would invest on photonic computer research, that would help advancement of society in all aspect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_computing
I read an ieee paper a few years ago that went into why photonic computing failed and why it won't ever succeed.
The problem is that photons are fat compared to electrons so circuits couldn't be made as small as they are already today. When cmos was 500 nm and researchers weren't sure if things could be made smaller, photonics made sense. But now they're at 3nm process (yes it is a marketing label, but pitch is 24 nm ) . Visible light has a wavelength of 400nm. The wave function of a photon would smear across circuits that small.
Intel presented photonic data bus between chips couple of months ago so I don't think compute would be useful other than quantum stuff.
Not so much technology, but I'd fund the Howard Society for real. For those unfamiliar, it's a program to identify people who are genetically predisposed to natural long life and pay them to have kids with each other; it's a core plot point in a bunch of Heinlein novels.
Isn't that just eugenics with extra steps?
It's actually eugenics without extra steps!
genetically engineered housing
We can all live in big fuck-off mushrooms like the Telvanni showed us
Replicator. But that kinda seems impossible so that Black and Decker rehydrator thingy from Back to the Future II.
Cybernetics hands down.
Matter transporters for work and holodecks for play.
I would stay in relatively achievable things like a sugar fuel cell or microbial food production. Things we don't quite have yet but not do to the knowledge not being there.
A better battery would be nice.
Perhaps the main use for technology is increasing the amount of inequality society can tolerate without collapse. I can't fix inequality -- that just seems to be what the humans want.
However by investing in surveillance technology, computer vision, and AI I could perhaps help our society to bear unbounded amounts of inequality indefinitely, without collapse. Social collapse is a less-than-zero-sum game, whereas an unequal society is still generally more-than-zero-sum. So I posit that the latter is objectively better.
Especially if you plan to survive long enough to get off this stinking rock -- you're going to need to concentrate resources, because the public sector only seems to be able to succeed at space travel under a very specific set of hard-to-replicate circumstances. Whereas greed, inflated egos, and concentrated power are easy to replicate.
Your objections will be noted.
... Are you suggesting that we increase inequality to make the world better? Like we need an overlord, be it robot or human, and the rest of the population needs to be placated, worked to the bone, and easily replaced?
I gotta assume I am just vastly misunderstanding something in this argument, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what it is. Is it just sarcastic?
I think the optimal outcome is that technology develops to permit our society to support increasing amounts of inequality. The increasing inequality will happen anyway, we'll just be able to bear it, or not. I'm won't suggest it's a good outcome, just the optimal one.