Looking into Our Future Let’s take a little look into the future and see what is waiting for us. Solar energy seems to be picking up steam and no that is not a pun. We see more homeowners every day adding solar panels to their homes, but soon solar panels of the type used today will disappear. The reason for this is they are now being made to look like ordinary roofing shingles by some companies and will soon be indistinguishable from the shingles we use every day. There is a rumor the government is going to either slow down the installation of solar panels or even ban them, but it is just a rumor and even if this happens it certainly won’t last. One of the scourges of our modern existence is cancer. We have been trying to find a cure for this menace for many decades and many pseudoscientists have claimed to be able to cure cancer, but to no avail. A very respected medical college, Albert Einstein College of Medicine has recently announced they found a compound that destroys cancer in people with acute myeloid leukemia. The good part about this besides curing of cancer is the fact the compound doesn’t hurt healthy cells. While this has only been tried on one part of the cancer spectrum scientists are holding out hope that it will work with many other cancers if not all. We could be on the verge of a cure for cancer in the future. While we’re on the subject of medicine I would also like to mention the fact MIT’s Center for Extreme Bionics wants to cure disabled people and they have started a five year 100-million-dollar project and this includes a synthetic nervous system, prosthetics which work like real limbs and as incredible as it sounds a synthetic spinal cord. The object of the project is to create a disability free world. They are developing ways to have a person’s nerves and muscles communicate with their prosthetics which means prosthetics would act the same as a real limbs. If they succeed we may not be able to tell if someone’s lamb is artificial or natural and there may be no one subjected to the ravages of diseases anymore which affect their skeletal structure. It’s hard to believe, but MRI, PET scans and other medical tests may no longer be needed in the future, because researchers are now saying they have created a camera which can see through the body. One of the uses for this camera will be to track endoscopes since this has never been possible before. Can it be refined enough to do away with these expensive medical tests? I guess we’ll have to wait for the future to see for ourselves. I think by now we all know driverless cars are coming, but what we may not know is the fact they are already here, but in relatively small numbers. Think of it this way, the first people to benefit from this may be the elderly who no longer can drive and need to take taxis everywhere. Next might be new drivers who will no longer need a driver’s license, since they will never actually drive a car. It is true probably anyone over forty will be somewhat scared at the prospect of not being in control of the vehicle, but younger people who have not known anything else will flock to this technology. Eventually it may turn out all the cars will be electric and gas stations will disappear or turn into charging stations. As charging becomes cheaper and faster the gasoline powered automobiles will be living on borrowed time. Unfortunately for us I think one of the other things which is going to come true is war is going to be fought by robots. Countries of the world are busy creating robotic weapons of all types. South Korea has robotic stations on their borders which control large guns aimed at North Korea. It still takes a human being to activate them the first time however. Robotic drones are being created which will be able to decide if they should destroy a target or not. We also have all sorts robotic gun platforms which can roll through a battle zone on their own while firing. We are starting to build robotic ships and some of the planes we are creating are dual-purpose and can either be flown by a pilot or a robotic intelligence. It seems like the world of Terminator is not far away. NASA has said some space missions might better be served by robots than humans. NASA is turning back the clock on one robot which is in the planning stage. It is known as the Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments or AREE. What makes this robot so different is the fact it is a clockwork robot and extremely hardy. They are planning to send it to Venus which has an atmosphere and high temperature that is famous for destroying probes. It is said this robot which is a mechanical device will be capable of performing a series of complex actions to achieve a specific result. We may see more robots like this in the future, which will be sent to the planets with the harshest conditions. There are different ways of predicting the future. One way is to listen to a so-called prophet and take his word as gospel. Another way is to check logarithms which are created to examine what is going on, on the Internet. A third way is to keep up with things which allows us to see with a reasonable degree of accuracy what might be coming in the future. I think if we asked a hundred people who were picked at random to name at least one thing in our future, most of them could do it. |
