What technologies are on the horizon which will change the world?

I'd like to restrict this to things which are actually on the horizon, so science fiction stuff like faster than light travel or brain-computer interfaces or AI (unless you can show that they are close) don't really count.

I can think of two at the moment, that will happen soon.

The first one is when full human genome sequencing will become so cheap that everybody can have it done.

This article here

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...earch.politics

Is interesting and shows the history of it, and predicts prices will come down rapidly over the next decade or so.

Just imagine, any medical study, or social study, or sports study, or pretty much anything, will be able to cheaply and easily do a detailed analysis of the DNA of every single person involved. I think this will lead to a huge leap forward in our understanding of dna as correlations will leap out of the data, where before people have had to search for specific genes.

Imagine the new information you could get by comparing the entire DNA of hundreds of thousands of people?

I predict that this could lead to major increases in life expectancy, of like 20-30 years... anyone who is genetically predisposed to any disease will be able to take pre-emptive action for a start, but honestly, I think the implications are endless.


My second one, is a bit unusual, but I think it will be when data storage methods become good enough, combined with increased battery life, for people to run total video and audio recordings of their life. Combine this with some intelligent text and speech recognition software and search (probably provided by Google) and suddenly no one will ever need to forget a conversation they had, a place they've been to, and book they have read, a tv show they have watched. An entire life's worth of data stored and search able on something quite similar to a mobile phone...

So, what do you think? Are my two rubbish? What else can you think of?

These

Stu

Looks good, but why is that going to change the world? People won't have to re-charge their phones as often? What big impact is that going to have on how people live their lives.

people won't have to re-charge their cell-phones as often

The energy density of these rival fossil fuels.

Stu

(sorry i could not resist).

sigh.....It means you will be able to drive your Tesla roadster 2500 miles between charges instead of only 250 miles. The energy density of these batteries allow electric cars to outperform fossil fuel cars in every category.

Stu

Yeah, but so what? People will drive electric cars instead of gas? I'm sure it will be good for the environment, but my life isn't going to be that different going to work in an electric car is it?

Anyways, come on guys, I thought my original ideas were interesting, any thoughts on those?

You'll be unemployed and not able to afford a car payment. A robot powered by these batteries will replace you.

Stu

Well, thanks for dropping by my thread, you really added a lot to it.

And at least one area where that will have massive and immediate impact is operating costs, which will be a fraction of gasoline powered cars. Which is great but will in turn prevent serious problems with road overcrowding in countries where fuel prices and congestion due to lack of space for new roads, as opposed to vehicle prices, are the main disincentive to drive - like Europe, Japan etc. Which will in turn pressure the development of smaller cars and automatic driving functionality (which works well at present, but is cost prohibitive at the user end without widescale implementation) allowing close regulated spacing of vehicles with programmed hands free driving. It could eventually spell the end of the car as we know it, and also the end of public transport, with the 'car' becoming a non-polluting destination programmable personal transport unit, with manual driving reserved for recreational use. That imo is about the epitome of a futuristic landscape.

The nanowire thing is like 1/3 of the solution to mankind's energy problems. If it works it saves a couple billion people from starving in the next 30 years, allows economic growth to continue for an extended period, etc. etc.

It's hard to overstate how much this would change the world.

Im really not getting it, spell it out to me in small words.

How is increased battery life going solve peoples energy problems? We still have to get the energy from somewhere? What particular problems is it going to solve?

Also, how do better batteries stop people from starving?

Wow, very interesting news!

I think the "so what" that might be important here is that our children and grandchildren will be able to breathe. That seems to be pretty revolutionary.

1. I can breathe now, so my children breathing too isn't really a change...

2. I'll ask again, where is all the energy that goes into these batteries going to come from?

Seems a logical conclusion. Thank God we'll have laws preventing governments having access to this info.

Hmm, good (if scary) point... I'd presume people would just delete or not record things they didn't want a record of. Also you could encrypt everything, but that wouldn't stop a government trying to force people to give them the passwords and punush those who wouldn't reveal certain documents...

It will be produced a lot closer to where it is used, from smaller, renewable power plants. Perhaps the utility will install a set of solar panels on your roof. At night you will read from a light which draws its power from batteries like these.

Batteries like these will be used in tiny machines that the doc injects into your blood stream to clean out all the plaque clogging your arteries.

Batteries like these are huge......for Christsake they make leafblowers noiseless.

Stu

Right now its neutral networks, artificial intelligence and neuroscience in combination that I see as the ones that can be the most earthshattering.

Other than that we got robotics (in the foreseeable future a lot of service functions can be done by robotics, which will probably change societies a lot), smart materials (which look extremely exciting) and personally I also am interested in nanobots and nubots and swarm intelligence applications.

And improved batteries/superconductors can work wonders, a lot of the solution to poverty problems lies right there.

Yeah I'm not sure governments would necessarily win encryption wars. I have a strong conviction that hackers are born not made, and those I've met seem to have been free-thinking/independent and not necessarily pro-government types.

There's going to be a lot of insta-deleting going on.

What technologies are on the horizon which will change the world?

H2O, free energy?!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIrLYdQu7tM

I posted this the other day. If it all works out it could be a vast improvement in a number of ways, and contemporary advances in genetic engineering of food crops suggest that's a distinct possibility.

http://************/6mk457

Ask the Navy and Air force MI complex...

Suppressing technology that would seem far fetched even today.

One isn't going to see 'life changing' things that they don't want you to have.So things that will help boost peoples life expectancy and/or undermine profitable economic endeavors (like the nanowire) will not be promoted, developed, and integrated into our societal framework for some time.