Future Technology

[Huero]

Is there anything in the future you've heard of that interests you? Do tell, please.
Personally I'm incredibly interested in FCS, particularly Future Force Warrior; espeially because of what I've been reading recently with exoskeletons amplifying strength and such. I also read about that nokia concept about the phone that was a watch, or anything you wanted really. I'm also looking forward to Windows Surface.

[Apoc4lypse]

Future propulsion methods, other than current rockets for space travel.

In particular the idea of an Anti-Gravity-Drive if you wanna call it that, or just a "Reactionless Drive".

Stuff along those lines interests me, that and alternate fuel/power sources, and more efficient power/fuel.

[ima_from_America]

Ion Thrusters.

[CN3089]

Photon torpedoes.

[Cortexian]

Turbo Lasers.

[Abdurahman]

Death Stars

[NuggetWarmer]

Hadron Colliders... owait

[legionaire45]

FTL Travel.
Man-portable rail gun systems (that are actually effective).
Fusion reactors.
Space Tourism.
Holographic Displays.
Teleportation/Wormhole/Your mom's hole Technology.

[Cortexian]

More Overlords.

[SnaFuBAR]

computer god communism.


i stand alone against your mad, deadly worldwide conspiratorial ganster computer god communism with wall to wall deadly gangster protection life long sworn conspirators murder incorporated organized crime the police and judges the deadly sneak parroting puppet gangsters using all the gangster deadly frankenstein controls these hangmen rope sneak deadly gangsters the judges and the police, trick trap rob wreck butcher and murder the people to keep them terrorized in gangster frankenstein earphone radio slavery

[Botolf]

Bio-technologically induced transhumanism.

Or, more plainly:

"My shirt... it's aliiiiiiiiiiiiive!"

[Pyong Kawaguchi]

Im interested in RL portal guns

[Bad Waffle]

im interested in cyborg parts, lest i lose an eye or arm

[blind]

trebuchets

[Hotrod]

I'm interested in the future of space exploration.

[kenney001]

Anybody seen that new show "fringe"? This technology stuff forms the plotline...

It was pretty decent for a first episode..

[Heathen]

Friend of mine went apeshit over that show. Meh. Also, I am with the Cybernetic parts thing. Ghost in the Shell future ftw...

[The_Wraith]

Friend of mine went apeshit over that show. Meh. Also, I am with the Cybernetic parts thing. Ghost in the Shell future ftw...Will happen. At least it's the most likely tbh. The internet is the future, space is too far off for me to get hyped up about. :(

[Botolf]

Anybody seen that new show "fringe"? This technology stuff forms the plotline...

It was pretty decent for a first episode..
It was kind of neutral. Titles were cool, crazy scientist was cool, shows some promise. I'll watch more of the season before passing final judgment.

Also, seeing Denethor from Lord of The Rings say, "Let's make some LSD!" was pretty awesome.

[Rob Oplawar]

I'm lookin forward to the summer home I'll buy on Mars when I reach 160 years of age thanks to both advances in medical science and the extensive cyberization of my body.

[Terin]

That's what I thought when I was a kid. "I can't die, they'll make medicine/technology that'll make me live forever!" :v:

Too bad we're all gonna die when the 2012 something-or-another kills us all hurr

I'm really looking forward to better fuel. Call me boring, but computers are pretty damn hi-tech as it is.

[Rob Oplawar]

ohhh, right, i forgot.

What I'm really looking forward to is when i'm 45, just three short years after the technological singularity, when the robots begin their world conquest. It'll be so cool, right up to the point when I'm lasered to death.

[Warsaw]

Dune much?

I want space navies. Fuck the treaties. If you really want a treaty to save us, just say no space combat in within x distance from Earth. Done. Established resource mining facilities on moons throughout the solar system means they need defending from other countries and their respective space programmes. Need to hold on to our holdings, damn it.

[klange]

Slipspace/hyperspace/subspace/alternate-dimension-without-c-restriction

Screw this solar system (and long flights).

[TeeKup]

Macross Zero, look it up.

[Rob Oplawar]

Either relativity is dead wrong, or there cannot possibly be faster than light travel.

spoilered longpost:

And when I say "dead wrong", I don't mean just wrong about the speed of light issue. The speed of light being insurmountable follows directly from everything relativity is about.

The gist of it is, all reasonable models of the universe only work if you take causality as an absolute law. Our universe cannot exist without causality; it is fundamental and inevitable. Therefore, if motion through space and time are interconnected, then you cannot possibly travel faster than the speed of light, and this includes magically appearing at your destination without "moving" as it entails crossing some distance in some amount of time.

Unfortunately, this even includes faster than light communication, as the root of the problem is really information traveling faster than the speed of light.

Basically this boils down to reference frames moving close to the speed of light with respect to each other and information traveling faster than the speed of light in one frame or the other- this could cause one event to occur in one frame but a different event in the other, which cannot happen. The relative timing of events may change, but the order of events cannot- this is causality.

The real kick in the balls is that the relativity of motion through space to motion through time is pretty damn well established. GPS satellites in orbit have to account for relativistic effects.

Hell, we can even observe the effects on particles moving very very close to the speed of light- take particle accelerators for example. We can see that time dilation is quite real, and is consistent with the speed of light.


tl;dr: we're pretty damn sure relativity is correct in terms of time dilation, and because of the causal nature of our universe, this means transmitting any sort of information faster than the speed of light is impossible.



Damn.

e: But this doesn't mean interstellar travel is impossible. It just means that no matter what it's gonna take a very long time to get there. But I firmly believe that we, as a species, will eventually leave our solar system. I'm an atheist; I have to have something ridiculous to believe in, with little to no evidence to support the validity of my claim. :P

[Botolf]

If we get wormholes working, we can live without magic FTL travel.

[klange]

Clearly somebody doesn't understand how slipspace/hyperspace/alternate-dimensions-without-c-restrictions work. They're all alternate dimensions without the c restriction. Or they're significantly smaller than our dimension, that's another possibility.

[armoman92]

Photon torpedoes.

http://www.scifig.com/picar1.gif

that would be interesting

[Rentafence]

Laser guns, lightsabers, alien tentacle rape, etc

[Rob Oplawar]

If we get wormholes working, we can live without magic FTL travel.


Clearly somebody doesn't understand how slipspace/hyperspace/alternate-dimensions-without-c-restrictions work. They're all alternate dimensions without the c restriction. Or they're significantly smaller than our dimension, that's another possibility.

No listen, that still involves being in one place at one time and in another at a later time. Even if there was no motion involved, there's still average velocity over some period of time spanning the instant you disappeared from one point and reappeared at another, and the average velocity there would be greater than the speed of light.

The problem is that if someone were moving near the speed of light from the destination to the source during the jump, from his perspective the person doing the jumping would arrive before he left, while from the jumper's perspective he would of course arrive after he left. This violates causality.

The concept of using "alternate dimensions" is laughable, and while I will concede the possibility of wormholes, they could nonetheless transmit the information no faster than the speed of light. Theoretically the wormhole could transmit the traveler at exactly the speed of light, in which case from the traveler's perspective the voyage would be literally instantaneous, but if the destination were four light years away four years would pass before the traveler came out the other side.

That's assuming wormholes are anything more than pure speculation.

[NullZero]

Looking forward to teleporters, cyborgs, human-like AI's, virtual butt-plugs etc.

[Botolf]

No listen, that still involves being in one place at one time and in another at a later time. Even if there was no motion involved, there's still average velocity over some period of time spanning the instant you disappeared from one point and reappeared at another, and the average velocity there would be greater than the speed of light.

The problem is that if someone were moving near the speed of light from the destination to the source during the jump, from his perspective the person doing the jumping would arrive before he left, while from the jumper's perspective he would of course arrive after he left. This violates causality.

The concept of using "alternate dimensions" is laughable, and while I will concede the possibility of wormholes, they could nonetheless transmit the information no faster than the speed of light. Theoretically the wormhole could transmit the traveler at exactly the speed of light, in which case from the traveler's perspective the voyage would be literally instantaneous, but if the destination were four light years away four years would pass before the traveler came out the other side.

That's assuming wormholes are anything more than pure speculation.
When I say wormhole travel, I mean travel where the objective is not to violate relativity. Locally, you'd be traveling well below lightspeed. Slower than "magic FTL", but still faster than traveling normally.