Category: Future

what if somehow we could get our hands on our very own black holes, and maybe even lots of them? What could we—or, for that matter, any putative extraterrestrials—do with them? What kind of perhaps extremely exotic structures or technology could eventually be made with them?

Source: Black Hole Tech?—Stephen Wolfram Blog

Four bottom lines up front:

• It would cost over $29 Trillion to generate America’s baseload electric power with a 50 / 50 mix of wind and solar farms, on parcels of land totaling the area of Indiana. Or:

• It would cost over $18 Trillion with Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) farms in the southwest deserts, on parcels of land totaling the area of West Virginia. Or:

• We could do it for less than $3 Trillion with AP-1000 Light Water Reactors, on parcels totaling a few square miles. Or:

• We could do it for $1 Trillion with liquid-fueled Molten Salt Reactors, on the same amount of land, but with no water cooling, no risk of meltdowns, and the ability to use our stockpiles of nuclear “waste” as a secondary fuel.

The bottom line

The only way we’re going to power the nation—let alone the planet—on carbon-free energy is with nuclear power. And the sooner we all realize that, the better.

Source: Let’s Run the Numbers – Nuclear Energy vs. Wind and Solar | The Energy Reality Project

disappointment in time capsules seems to run endemic
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In his book Predicting the Future, Nicholas Rescher writes that “we incline to view the future through a telescope, as it were, thereby magnifying and bringing nearer what we can manage to see.” So too do we view the past through the other end of the telescope, making things look farther away than they actually were, or losing sight of some things altogether.

These observations apply neatly to technology.

But when it comes to culture we tend to believe not that the future will be very different than the present day, but that it will be roughly the same.

And when culture does change, the precipitating events can be surprisingly random and small.

Source: Tom Vanderbilt Explains Why We Could Predict Self-Driving Cars, But Not Women in the Workplace

imagine if you could travel back in time and offer to show one of those Boeing engineers what air travel would look like in 2014, fifty years on.

What might he have expected to see? … Consider what that engineer had seen happen in his own lifetime. The first attempts at powered flight took place right around the time he was born.
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I submit to you that the last thing that Boeing engineer would expect to see in 2014 is what actually happened. … Unless you are an airplane nerd, you would be hard pressed to distinguish the 787 from its grandfather.

It’s not that the technology failed. … But it wasn’t worth it! Because the technologies we had were good enough.

Today I hope to persuade you that the same thing that happened to aviation is happening with the Internet. … the devices we use are becoming ‘good enough’, to the point where we can focus on making them cheaper, more efficient, and accessible to everyone.

So despite appearances, despite the feeling that things are accelerating and changing faster than ever, I want to make the shocking prediction that the Internet of 2060 is going to look recognizably the same as the Internet today.

We can store incredible amounts of information, but we can’t really move it around. So the world of the near future is one of power constrained devices in a bandwidth-constrained environment. It’s very different from the recent past, where hardware performance went up like clockwork, with more storage and faster CPUs every year.

Source: Web Design – The First 100 Years