Based on experience, a day in my life 15 years from now will look a lot like a day in my life now. Except, hopefully, I won't still be working on my second master's degree, and I'll have kids.
This "article" is nothing more than fantasy written in the same vein as similar articles in the 50s. 15 years from now will be NOTHING like the article.
It will be like today, with some fairly minor improvements. Think of the improvements between 1995 and today.
See the revolutionary awesome difference? No? That's because there were no revolutionary changes. We got faster processors, smaller phones, faster internet connections, etc, etc, etc. But those are all minor in the grand scheme of thi
I'd say one or two things will be dramatically different from now, while most other things will be very slightly different or exactly the same. I can't think of a 15-year period since 1900 when there wasn't at least one dramatic breakthrough that changed some aspect of society.
My money would be on Google cars and Google glass coming to fruition, and on photovoltaics becoming ubiquitous.
You'll probably have your genome on file 15 years from now, because the cost of doing it will be trivial, but I doubt that it will make much difference in practice unless you happen to have one of the very specific things that they'l have stumbled on personalized cures for.
1. Affordable radios that connect digital devices with one another (WiFi, GPRS, 3G, 4G). 2. Affordable lightweight rechargeable batteries. 3. Affordable thin lightweight screens (LCD, OLED). 4. Affordable digital photography sensors. 5. Easy to use software and web services that change the way we consume media and communicate with other people (Google, Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook, etc).
The iPhone merges all of these things into one package, but it's far from the only thing that has changed. Ev
None of those changed anything. My monitor got smaller. I still have a monitor. I still have a mouse and keyboard. But my monitor got thinner. And that's your list for "dramatic breakthrough" The flexible-touch screen OLED screens would have been dramatic, but they still aren't here. Digital photography sensors changed nothing, and were invented in 1975, 20 years before you claim they were a "dramatic breakthrough", though they did become more affordable over time, just like phones and computers, neit
Almost nobody cares when something was "invented", whatever that means (first thought of? first described in detail? first prototype? first series production?). New inventions begin to matter when they become useful and affordable to a large number of users in the wealthy parts of the world.
If the things I listed have not dramatically changed the way that you consume media and tele-communicate then you're probably someone who doesn't consume a lot of newly produced media and someone who prefers to communica
USB flash Drives! Although certainly not fail-proof, they are the true successor to the Floppy. A lot more reliable than the floppy, higher capacity than a floppy, significantly faster, and a lot smaller.
It always boggled my mind people that kept documents ONLY on floppy (as opposed to transport between machines or as a backup). The number of times I've seen sole copies of a major term paper completely lost due to a "Not Ready reading drive A: (A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore" is heartbreaking.
PV is on the whole stupid. Expensive and dirty to manufacture, low-efficiency, overspecialized use of space.
We have natural gas air conditioning units. We have solar hot water heaters and hydronic heating systems. My house is going to get a solar hot water heat upgrade, followed by a hydronic system. The hot water system usually switches off halfway through the day, so there's excess heat. The tank is 160F-190F, with a thermostatic mixing valve following to add cold water to set 135F household water t
Yeah, gas will be more important than PV and we're probably moving towards a methane economy, but the average person will barely notice it in their day to day life.
I'm talking about the sort of stuff that you could weave into a "a day in the life of" story, like like roofs everywhere being covered in PV panels because they've become so cheap that you might as well do it. If you think that PV cells are stupid, do not buy them and do tell your government to stop subsidizing them. I think they will turn out to
Yeah, gas should be good for 100 years; but even beyond that, look at Europe and look at some one-off US projects. Europe has fields of parabolic reflectors basically doing a miniature SAPL at a sterling engine to drive a dynamo--looks like a satellite dish with a big metal brick at the antenna focal point. The US has one or two large-scale molten salt generators that do the same, just on a giant penis-shaped tower that's easier to take out if you want to down the grid (yeah dropping a plane in a field of
Nothing about installing infrastructure is cheap--and face it, replacing your water heater, your AC, your furnace, and running the plumbing for a rooftop array is infrastructure. I still want to know how the utilities will function when everyone generates their own. I'm betting on a huge mark-up on electricity so the baseline is expensive.
I love your ideas. I'd do one thing different: I'd take the hot loop and a Sterling engine to make rotational force to not just drive the pump, but a compressor. This would provide the cooling needed for a house wide air conditioning system.
The reason I'd go that route over an absorption fridge is that absorption systems are very fussy. Get one off level, and the rust inhibiter, sodium chromate, will cook out and form solids, which will not just plug up the lines, but with it not being in the liquid, th
Supercapacitors are inherently a bad design. They're basically just capacitors that are broken--the dielectric doesn't exist, rather conductors are slapped together and by virtue of not being an actual solid piece they won't get any electrical flow below a very low potential. That means they only run at pretty low voltage.
PROPER capacitors built with nanomaterials will work better, but they'll also require higher grade of technology than we have.
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.
- Alan Turing
Based on experience (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
I'll second this.
This "article" is nothing more than fantasy written in the same vein as similar articles in the 50s. 15 years from now will be NOTHING like the article.
It will be like today, with some fairly minor improvements. Think of the improvements between 1995 and today.
See the revolutionary awesome difference? No? That's because there were no revolutionary changes. We got faster processors, smaller phones, faster internet connections, etc, etc, etc. But those are all minor in the grand scheme of thi
Re:Based on experience (Score:3)
I'd say one or two things will be dramatically different from now, while most other things will be very slightly different or exactly the same. I can't think of a 15-year period since 1900 when there wasn't at least one dramatic breakthrough that changed some aspect of society.
My money would be on Google cars and Google glass coming to fruition, and on photovoltaics becoming ubiquitous.
You'll probably have your genome on file 15 years from now, because the cost of doing it will be trivial, but I doubt that it will make much difference in practice unless you happen to have one of the very specific things that they'l have stumbled on personalized cures for.
Re: (Score:2)
Please name one dramatic breakthrough that exists today that did not exist in 1997.
Remember you said dramatic. And despite Jobs' product speeches, the iPhone does not count as dramatically different.
Re: (Score:2)
My list would be:
1. Affordable radios that connect digital devices with one another (WiFi, GPRS, 3G, 4G).
2. Affordable lightweight rechargeable batteries.
3. Affordable thin lightweight screens (LCD, OLED).
4. Affordable digital photography sensors.
5. Easy to use software and web services that change the way we consume media and communicate with other people (Google, Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook, etc).
The iPhone merges all of these things into one package, but it's far from the only thing that has changed. Ev
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Almost nobody cares when something was "invented", whatever that means (first thought of? first described in detail? first prototype? first series production?). New inventions begin to matter when they become useful and affordable to a large number of users in the wealthy parts of the world.
If the things I listed have not dramatically changed the way that you consume media and tele-communicate then you're probably someone who doesn't consume a lot of newly produced media and someone who prefers to communica
Re: (Score:1)
Please name one dramatic breakthrough that exists today that did not exist in 1997.
Remember you said dramatic. And despite Jobs' product speeches, the iPhone does not count as dramatically different.
Not the iPhone specifically, but the rise of general purpose smart phones with data access to the internet practically everywhere..
Re: (Score:2)
USB flash Drives! Although certainly not fail-proof, they are the true successor to the Floppy. A lot more reliable than the floppy, higher capacity than a floppy, significantly faster, and a lot smaller.
It always boggled my mind people that kept documents ONLY on floppy (as opposed to transport between machines or as a backup). The number of times I've seen sole copies of a major term paper completely lost due to a "Not Ready reading drive A: (A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore" is heartbreaking.
-partially tongue i
Re: (Score:2)
PV is on the whole stupid. Expensive and dirty to manufacture, low-efficiency, overspecialized use of space.
We have natural gas air conditioning units. We have solar hot water heaters and hydronic heating systems. My house is going to get a solar hot water heat upgrade, followed by a hydronic system. The hot water system usually switches off halfway through the day, so there's excess heat. The tank is 160F-190F, with a thermostatic mixing valve following to add cold water to set 135F household water t
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, gas will be more important than PV and we're probably moving towards a methane economy, but the average person will barely notice it in their day to day life.
I'm talking about the sort of stuff that you could weave into a "a day in the life of" story, like like roofs everywhere being covered in PV panels because they've become so cheap that you might as well do it. If you think that PV cells are stupid, do not buy them and do tell your government to stop subsidizing them. I think they will turn out to
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, gas should be good for 100 years; but even beyond that, look at Europe and look at some one-off US projects. Europe has fields of parabolic reflectors basically doing a miniature SAPL at a sterling engine to drive a dynamo--looks like a satellite dish with a big metal brick at the antenna focal point. The US has one or two large-scale molten salt generators that do the same, just on a giant penis-shaped tower that's easier to take out if you want to down the grid (yeah dropping a plane in a field of
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I love your ideas. I'd do one thing different: I'd take the hot loop and a Sterling engine to make rotational force to not just drive the pump, but a compressor. This would provide the cooling needed for a house wide air conditioning system.
The reason I'd go that route over an absorption fridge is that absorption systems are very fussy. Get one off level, and the rust inhibiter, sodium chromate, will cook out and form solids, which will not just plug up the lines, but with it not being in the liquid, th
Re: (Score:2)
Supercapacitors are inherently a bad design. They're basically just capacitors that are broken--the dielectric doesn't exist, rather conductors are slapped together and by virtue of not being an actual solid piece they won't get any electrical flow below a very low potential. That means they only run at pretty low voltage.
PROPER capacitors built with nanomaterials will work better, but they'll also require higher grade of technology than we have.