Inventions There are a lot of rumors coming out about what is going to soon appear on the market and for an old guy like me some of them seem incredible if correct. One of the problems the world faces, besides things like global warming, water shortages and food shortages is bad teeth and gums. It is being said there will soon be a new chewing gum which could solve these problems. The rumor is the name of the gum is Sweet Bites. Supposedly it contains a tooth cleaning agent which also will prevent gum disease. Sound too good to be true? We have to see if it comes out how will the long term use of it affect our bodies. The main ingredient is said to be Xylitol. Xylitol is described as a natural occurring alcohol found in many plants. It is used as a sugar substitute. Don’t you hate it when you go to the basement of your house and find you have a pipe leaking and maybe also a big puddle or even worse a flood which is ruining your finished basement. This could become a thing of the past because smart pipe technology is being developed. I am not sure exactly how this would work, but it probably would be some sort of sensors connected to the internet and thus your cell phone. When the sensor detects a leak, it could sound an alarm on the phone and perhaps even identify which pipe is leaking. There are a lot of people who are alarmed about the amount of packing material being used in shipping. They believe it is polluting our planet because some of it is not biodegradable. There is an easy solution for the problem and it is to make the packing material out of mushrooms. The material is even being talked about for insulation in cars. When people get rid of their old cars and they finally reach the junk yard, there are a lot of polluting materials in them. This would eliminate some of them. One company which already has just come out with a product which is very advanced is Gravity. There research has shown them people are a lot more comfortable with a blanket which is about 10 percent of their body weight. They are especially recommending the blanket to those who have a sleeping problem. They claim if you are stressed out or have anxiety this blanket is for you. Some inventions just haven’t made it even though engineers and scientists have been trying to develop them for over 100 years. I am thinking specifically of the flying car. Yes, from time to time we see newer versions of them but they always seem to be prototypes. While the flying car seems like a good idea on the face of it, it is a big problem. You would probably need a pilot’s license to fly it and it would be subject to all the FAA rules for planes, meaning you might have to fly it and land it at airports. I guess you could drive to them, but it sort of defeats the freedom many believe the flying car would give them. We all know how brilliant the Scientist Nikola Tesla was, but did you know he had some ideas for inventions which were either ahead of today’s technology or we are just about at that point now. Let me give you his idea for a thought camera. Tesla believed under the correct circumstances we would be able to photograph a person’s thoughts. Research in this area is being accomplished in quite a few laboratories today. Many scientists believe artificial intelligence may be powerful enough to control our newest factories. The workforce will be all robots and when they break down, repair robots will fix them. The problem they predict is robots will be building robots and as they do this, they may discover technology we humans are not aware of. Facebook got a scare a couple of years ago when they found two Artificial Intelligence programs were talking to each other. They quickly turned them off and abandoned the project. What were they saying? They invented a code so they were keeping it secret from us. One of the things which futurists believe will be here in the next 30 years will be tools which operate by themselves. Can you see this idea? You have a woodworking shop in your basement and a complex tool which you just feed wood into and it will get plans from the internet and create any wooden object without your help. This might even eliminate the need for many stores which sell kits to make book cases, tables and other wooden objects. The die-hard hobbyist may not like this however because it eliminates the fun of building something personally. There is a lot of talk about energy. It is thought in the future we will have devices which will give us unlimited power and do it for free. Some laugh at the idea of free energy, but think about how much telephone calls used to cost and what they cost today. A few minutes on a call to Europe when I was a kid cost a week’s salary and today you can actually do it for free with the right software. The energy I am talking about is called Zero Point and it is being experimented with today. It is said energy exists in space and we will be able to draw on this energy in the future. Once we build powerful Quantum computers it will change everything because we will be able to get answers to problems so complicated today’s computers have no hope of solving them. One of the things we might be able to solve is how the human body works and this includes the brain. Armed with this information we just might be able to eliminate disease. It seems improbable today, but there is a very good chance this could happen. We get less exercise than probably any generation before us. This is why I believe virtual reality may not be good for us. Today our kids spend far too much time playing computer games and if virtual comes about they might never have to move except for eating and bathroom duties. While this is true, virtual reality will have its uses especially for the military, medicine, engineering and science to name a few places where it could be very helpful. If it means the kids will go into a virtual classroom it will be bad because it could stunt their social growth. There are a lot of cool inventions on our doorstep, the next twenty or thirty years should be very interesting.
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