The future is here! or not...
When I was a child I dreamt of being able to speak or see friends anytime anywhere, today the wifi PDAs make it possible with the video calling. I thought the useful to know where you are and where you are going, today we have the GPS and handheld navigators. I watched the TV and imagined the multilingual TV series, today I'm watching TDT and that is possible. Then it was the future, today is the now.
There are also some dreams to be fulfilled: Real time satellite images of the entire world, travel to anywhere on Earth in few minutes, electronic devices controlled by thought or by eyes, ... All these are much closer today, but let's redefine the future bit by bit ;-)
posted by JOlaizola @ 11:13 PM
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4 Comments:
The future is here: could anyone (middle class, in Spain) have imagined 20 years ago being able to fly London-Madrid paying for the ticket the equivalent salary of one day of your live?
Your loyal reader,
Fran
Francisco, that's true. You can travel round trip Milan-Frankfurt or London-Frankfurt by less than 5 euro cent (plus taxes, fees & charges). 5 cents is less than the day income of most of the world people.
But the beauty of this is that at the same time we are reaching the future we are able to imagine new amazing things that were beyond of our wildest dreams.
So let's imagine...
What is the wildest thing you'd like to see in "the future"? In other words, what invent would you like to see made true?
I advance my response: Teletransportation. An object (e.g. myself) dissapeared and it is inmidiately replicated somewhere else.
F
The teletransportation is far beyond our near future and also it brings thousand of ethical issues.
To make a teletransportation machine you must be able to:
a) Read the exact position of all the atoms and their connections of a physical structure. The Heisenberg indeterminacy principle tells us this is impossible.
b) Transmit all the information to destination "teletransporter"
c) Rebuild the same structure. You have to create all the atoms and their connection at the light speed to be sure the final object is not transformed during the creation. Imagine, otherwise, you need only a second to rebuild the heart, it would fail the beats.
And if you know the "energy conservation law" you would need to create unimaginable ammount of energy to create only a small object. If you take Einstein's famous equation (e=mc2), it tells you that to regenerate a gram of mass you will need 900 billions ergs or 90,000 joules (equivalent to 2,000 tons of gasoline or the energy necessary to maintain a high energy 1,000W light for 2850 years).
So to get to this you have first to eliminate the entire World energy problem forever. You can say you would get the energy from the mass of the source. To be able to produce energy from your mass you have to create a process that needs also huge ammount of energy and you have to transmit trillions of terabytes so at the end this would not be energy efficient.
But appart from the physical feasibility of making a "teletransporter" there are some ethical issues. If you can copy completely an object to transmit it, you would be able to make copies of yourself, of any metal, money, of anything. You would never die, when you get older you create a copy of yourself with 20 years and transmit your "last copy of the brain to it".
What I believe is possible is to transmit a 3D imagine of yourself to a far distance so you can be in a meeting in New York, while you are physically seated in your office in London.
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